"Artist Francine Spiegel likes goop and gore. She needs about 10 pounds of grits, five jugs of pancake syrup, 20 cans of whipped cream, Fruit Loops, fake arms, and some blood, just to get started.

That's the material she used for "Mud & Milk," her latest exhibition at Deitch, in which she depicts women as monstrous creatures, seductive and gory all at the same time, though the real grit to work lies in her inspiration. She's also motivated by her mother and horror films -- for her new gross-out show, she looked to the bonnet-wearing women of the spaghetti Western Four of the Apocalypse as her muse. "I like that they're shown as pioneers," she says, "and, at the same time, as reluctant victims."

What pleases you aesthetically?

Sometimes it's a pie in the face. But mostly it's goop and gore and how women are affected by it.

 I've been building fictional women that have been empowered and beaten down... ​It's a graphic approach but it's freeing to work directly from any image that I'm drawn to. Images from different worlds can loosely exist and play off one another.