Aurel Schmidt: Trash Dolls

Aurel Schmidt’s intricately detailed drawings are a reflection of her life here in New York in that their individual parts pulled from the physical and emotional detritus of downtown. The drawings include objects such as flies, condoms, and cigarette packs and burns which are pieced together to form larger figures. Precious and personal, the work is exacting, highly detailed and teeming with overt intimacy. By using leftover garbage as the building blocks for her subjects, Schmidt’s work becomes a sort of memento mori—a reminder of our own vulnerability and mortality.