At the culmination of his PhD, Jay Kochel presents Exact Fantasies, a series of four tableaux that explore the relationships between fetish, magic and interfacing the body with sensations of contact and contagion.

Sculptural work examines the embodied relationship bewteen the fetish object and the body, through material metaphors of containment, boundaries and fluidity. These metaphors operate to incorporate perceptions of purity and contagion through principles of sympathetic magic to explore personified qualities of the inanimate. The work is presented as a series of installation tableaux alluding to phantasmagoria and a Freudian sense of the uncanny, a sense of the familiar made foreign. This sense of misrecognition acknowledges the power of mimetic transformation that occurs through sympathetic magic, giving bodily power to objects that bear no resemblance to the bodies they reference.