Sculpture presented as part of the group exhibition I’ll See You in the Ether, held at Torus (ex Hunter Shaw Fine Arts), curated by Jonny Negron. The show featured works by Cécile di Giovanni, Nina Hartmann, Benjamin Kellogg, Jonny Negron, and Lisa Signorini. It opened on November 10 and remained on view through December 22, 2019.

Cécile di Giovanni exhibited the work The Slayer, which plays with fetishization, cultural memory, and fictional corporeality through an assemblage that is both absurd and symbolically charged. A reversed silicone foot placed inside an iconic 1990s sneaker becomes the paradoxical base of an inverted monument. The tattoo of Buffy the Vampire Slayer — a cult television heroine — inscribed on the synthetic skin, marks the body with a figure of strength, resistance, and ambiguity.

As in much of Di Giovanni’s work, the domestic or popular object (here, the sneaker) is repurposed to activate a shared visual memory, while the fake, fragmented body speaks as much to fetishism as to survival. The reversal of the foot plays with the logic of the simulacrum: it is not a foot, but the image of a possible body — a fictionalized body — whose skin becomes a narrative surface. At the intersection of prop, relic, and toy, this sculpture brings together the intimate and the collective, the kitsch and the sacred.