Gerald Peters Contemporary is pleased to present its first exhibition of the 2025 summer season, Material Girl: Pop Culture and the Female Gaze. Bringing together six female artists working across media, the exhibition will highlight the connections between the artists’ personal histories and social, political, and cultural realities of today.

Anchored in Pop Art, the exhibition explores how these artists use the genre’s vocabulary of familiar imagery, bold colors, and ready-made objects to examine socio-political concerns.  Probing gender, sexuality, materialism, and commodification, these works offer profound personal introspection and keen societal awareness.

Esther Elia (b. 1994) is an Assyrian-Irish artist from Turlock, California. Her interdisciplinary practice engages family folklore as the basis for understanding mixed ethnicity and the question of how to be Assyrian in diaspora.

Elia’s practice spans small to colossal-sized sculptures. With inspirations from Assyrian folk stories to contemporary bodybuilders, Elia is interested in the intersection of tradition, history, gender, and shared personal experience. Her sculptures created from stacked tiles create totemic forms that re-represent Assyrian women in diaspora as goddesses, warriors, and bodybuilders. The scale and subject matter portray literally and figuratively strength and power of women.