CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/17/2021

'Hannah Whitaker: Ursula' is new from ITI Press

Featured spreads are from Hannah Whitaker: Ursula, the new photobook from Image Text Ithaca Press. Investigating the ways that subservient sci-fi tropes like digital servants and sex robots are generally gendered as female, this work is mysterious, luminous, sometimes funny and always alluring. Texts are by Dawn Chan and David Levine, who writes, "The things that matter are celestial. The things that matter are Platonic. Look into my eyes and what do you see? Movies. Ring flash. The world asked for me to be this way. Highly reflective. Not just the sunglasses, but my face, polished within an inch of its life. Nonporous. A contemporary saint, my body covered in USB ports, surrounded by photographers. Click click click click click. My background an RP screen of clouds rushing by, or a horizon, infinitely deferred. To a beat. Asleep on the horizon, my body beneath the dunes, my jaw is set toward the future. The future I project myself into. The body I pour myself into, my plastic shoulders the size of aircraft carriers, rotating in the dusk."