Cherchez la Femme, an exhibition of new works on paper by American artist Pamela Joseph, opens at the Hervé Lourdel Gallery in Paris on Thursday, June 24, from 4-8 p.m. The show will run until July 24.

The exhibition includes comic book covers, recent drawings and watercolors from the series The Adventures of Pussy Marshmallow, completed during the artist's residencies at the American Academy in Rome during 2003 and 2004. Cherchez la Femme is Joseph’s first one-person show in Paris.

Pussy Marshmallow is the alter-ego of the artist, the burlesque circus strongwoman who finds out what life is made of beyond the ring. This character evolved from the persona of the Strong Woman Cat Girl, an interactive sculpture and popular attraction at Joseph's multi-media museum traveling exhibition, The Sideshow of the Absurd. In Cherchez la Femme, Pussy is seen in compromising or precarious positions while she negotiates with physical and personal power. She mounts a rocket in one frame; poses for a girlie magazine; goes snowboarding; consults with a circus fortuneteller; and captures and rides the Golden Unicorn, a mythic symbol of purification.

Joseph’s body of work to date has explored issues of sexuality, gender, domesticity and power with an absurdist's dark sense of humor. The artist's subjects are strong contemporary women, women who take chances, women who dare to audaciously break the rules in the game of the sexes, and fantasies about them. The work has included paintings, drawings and sculptures of bodies that challenge the categories of the “feminine”, including human-animal hybrids, cyborgs, mutants and circus freaks.

In Cherchez la Femme is The Roman Calendar Girl Series, developed when Joseph discovered some 60's Italian pin-up calendars at a flea market in Rome. She created her first Calendar Girls Series, paintings and collages on shooting targets, in 1998. This new version, Twelve Months of Pussy, combines watercolors on old pages from a geometry workbook. In the calendar, our hero’s personality changes over the year from foxy, to sexy, to funny. She lives a life of independence and creativity as the lively toast of her company. She is from the school of hard knocks, the ballerina tight-rope walker with torn tights, the trapezist who does not fear breaking her painted nails.

Also featured in Cherchez la Femme are Joseph’s comic book covers that easily combine sexual iconography with religious imagery. For many years the artist has had an ongoing fascination with the image of the Madonna, a symbol of strength and purity. While in Rome she became interested in mixing ideas of the sacred and profane as she observed the religious portrayals of the Virgin and juxtaposed them with a contemporary Italian sensibility and acceptance of sexuality.

Pamela Joseph’s work has been exhibited widely throughout the U.S.A., in Berlin, Copenhagen, and most recently Beijing and Shenyang, China where her prints were included in Open Source, a traveling exhibition of digital media arts. Currently, Pussy comic book pages are traveling in the show Comic Release: Negotiating Identity for a New Generation. Joseph's work has been described as "well-executed, powerful, and edgy" by The Colorado Council on the Arts, who awarded her a Fellowship in 2001. The Sideshow of the Absurd debuted at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in the United States and has since traveled to five additional venues. The most recent installation was at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, Florida where The Sideshow attracted the largest crowds in the history of the museum space. Picked as a "favorite" exhibition by art writers in New York, Florida, New Mexico, Colorado and the Midwest The Sideshow has been lauded as "funky," "freaky," and "fascinating." Even in south Florida, the land of amusement parks, The Sideshow was tagged as easily the most bizarre show to hit the area in a long time. (Broward-Palm Beach New Times).