Jemima Stehli challenges notions of narcissism and critical distance by performing nude for her camera in her studio. In her series Strip (1999), she slowly reveals her naked body to a series of male curators, art dealers, writers and critics, asking them to release her camera's shutter through a cable from time to time. The set is her studio, a place that is often considered a site of narcissistic production, and her body is one that fits the idealized version of a female body promoted by the media. In this respect she is complicit in the promotion of the ideal, but at the same time her narcissistic strategies seem overly deliberate. By using the power of a body stripped bare to agitate and fluster, Stehli denies her subject control of his own image, while simultaneously relinquishing her own control by asking him to decide on the moment of representation. Her exhibitionism creates a complicated web of subject-object relationships, as the man is forced to objectify himself while in the process of projecting his own gaze alternately at the artist and her camera, and hence also at the viewer. Ultimately Stehli undermines the position of the privileged, removed voyeur, and its effects are visceral.
