What is the statement about feminism you are making through your alter egos?
I am way into the latter, and not the former. Or, as a friend once said, there’s a difference between “authentically performing” and “performing authenticity” online. I just do that online, and too many people conflate them. I think it’s expected that a person would act differently at home with their kids, with their loved one in bed, at a work meeting, or singing to a stadium of thousands of people. But I’m trying to get over caring about that. So while I love working on my projects – they bring so much artistic and personal joy and exploration for me – it’s unfortunately still overshadowed by harsh negative judgements I get. It’s been surprising that some close friends and family members have had a problem with what I do online. They are quite all consuming in terms of my artistic conceptualization, as well as socially (at least digi-socially), Some people can understand that an online performance isn’t necessarily how a person is, some can’t. How does having online alter egos affect your normal life as Leah? They’re linked to unique stages in my life (and the Internet’s life) and my various online interests and presentations. I like to think of them as heteronyms, or different names for the same thing, although they are different names for different aspects of me. It’s a space for healthy expressions and explorations of arousal, which includes any form of verbally expressed desire that is not hateful. I actually think of my Instagram as a therapeutic space. I started Ona during the last semester of my MFA in Fine Art at Parsons, and she also acts as a really great platform for me to explore my conceptual and visual art. But I’m happy to do this as I want more love and peace between the sexes, and it’s my hope that the project will spread that message.
#ONA ARTIST FOR FREE#
Ona shares most of her stuff for free or near free – the Instagram, the music, videos. Ona is in a way an attempt to take the original pro-sex ideas that I learned through practicing Naked Therapy and make them more mainstream. There’s something happening there, but it’s mostly ignored in the mainstream. And I think I’m also really spot on with the original questions that sparked it, and they are as important as ever. So I came up with the idea, put it online, people started doing it, and as word spread more people did it. Like, what if male arousal was allowed in therapy, just like female arousal is? Like, what’s going on online with all the naked girls and all the men wanting to see them and how would that play out in a therapeutic context? It’s such a huge thing in terms of online activity, yet it’s really rarely discussed in the mainstream. Sarah White started as a real, “what if” adventure. What was your motivation behind creating, firstly, Sarah White The Naked Therapist, then Instagram celebrity, musician and artist Ona? In pursuit of reclaiming ownership over her image, creating a therapeutic space, and challenging the notion that a woman cannot be publicly sexual without being slut-shamed, NYC based artist Leah Schrager conceptualised two online alter egos that live out different aspects of herself.įounding The Original Naked Therapy Practice in 2010 under the alias of Sarah White, and subsequently in her final year studying Fine Art at Parsons, – the sexually liberated Instagram celebrity who has since garnered 372,000 followers and launched an EP, Sex Rock – Leah has been pushing the boundaries of conceptual performance art, while exploring themes of art vs commerce, the male and female gaze and web identity.Īs she continues to make a feminist statement through her provocative work, we caught up with the self proclaimed “extreme selfie model” and “female Elvis” to ask how she retains her sense of self, what Sarah White and Ona Artist mean to her, and the positive and negative responses she receives.
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