Escape fantasies

We can find the lust on the skin, and we can find the ecstasy in the eyes. In 'Ek-stas' (2017), by Åsa Ersmark, a woman looks at us with a serene gaze glancing in her eyes, coloured by the violent relaxation of the post-orgasmic state of being. Imagery representing and depicting female sexual pleasure, in art history and in the wider realm of visual culture, is still almost nonexistent. In her practice, Åsa Ersmark has plunged into the deep waters, creating her own imagery by drawing from depictions of religious ecstasy, utopic psychedelia, psycho analytical apertures in dream worlds, affectionate, affective and affirmative notions of womanhood considered as ideal, and the leaking associative cracks in all of these notions" (from the essay by Elina Suoyrjö)