In this particular volume, the sequel to Wolfe’s 2023 Apophenia, the artist homes in on modes of seduction, often in relation to personal identity. Drawing on conventional images of beauty—fashionable Western women, high classical art, exquisite botanicals, luxe objects—she simulates the visual excess of the beau ideal that surrounds us every day. What kind of perfection, what desired reality, do we strive for, she appears to ask, given the seemingly incidental but wholly deliberate images filtering through our world for constant consumption? Wolfe cuts through this noise with her layered gestures, slicing images and recombining them, or adding shadows or gloriously garish colors, creating surprising aberrations from accepted or established forms. In essence, she turns to the grotesque, as theorized by Mikhail Bakhtin, inverting or overturning hierarchies and bringing together otherwise discrete realms. Her destabilizing or distorting of our sense of order—our dominant ways of understanding —can be gratifying, wondrous, funny, even estranging. In embracing what Wolfgang Kayser described as the “ominous tension” of the grotesque, her art awakens our imagination and coaxes us toward deeper emotional and unbounded ways of seeing.
APOPHENIA Vol. 02: Exquisite Corpse
Book Title: APOPHENIA VOLUME 02: Exquisite Corpse
Book Category: Artist’s Book
Publisher: APOPHENIA Press
Designer: Rational Beauty / Jeanette Birdy
Photography: John Woo
Release Date: September 1, 2025
Edition: 300
Page count: 236 pages
Book size: 265cm x 330cm
Book content: CMYK + neon pink, artwork, photographs, poetry and essays
Printer: KOPA, Lithuania
Paper: 150gsm and 300gsm Munken Pure Rough, Reflex IBO, Typeface: ABC Maxi
Cover: Double cover with 3 cover designs
Binding: Smyth sewn, open spine