Remember when Rudy Giuliani got famously ticked off about Chris Ofili's dung-adorned "Holy Virgin Mary" after it went on display at the Brooklyn Museum? Well, French artist Soasig Chamaillard's depictions of Jesus's mother are generally much cuter, but they're also creating a stir in the city of Nantes, where Catholic critics have blasted a recent exhibition of her work as "scandalous, "shameful," and "blasphemous."

Chamaillard uses repurposed Virgin Mary statuettes in her work, dressing them up in pop-culture outfits to create figurines that include a Supergirl Mary, a vampire Mary, and even a My Little Pony Mary. On the Catholic web site Observatoire de la Christianophobie, one commenter described the following reaction to Chamaillard's work: "Faced with so much sacrilege tears came spontaneously to my eyes."
Another user just offered up a prayer: "May this 'artist' burn in hell and may flames devour this gallery."

For her part, Chamaillard is surprised by these strident reactions and says that her goal is not to shake believers' faith. "I suspected that this could shock the sensibilities of certain people, but I didn't think there would be so many of them," she told ARTINFO France. "As an artist, you don't necessarily see the clash between your internal world and the external world." Chamaillard expressed regret that some people feel wounded by what she has made. Nevertheless, "faith is not in statues, and perhaps they should remember that," she said. "Faith should be strong enough to remain unshaken by simple objects. I think they need to step back from the object and not forget that it's an artistic work."

Despite the controversy, the show at the Albane Gallery was a success: it brought together figurines on loan from collectors of the artist's work along with five new pieces, which all sold. Chamaillard likes putting the Virgin Mary into a modern context and sees her work above all as about "women in contemporary society." Some critics accused her of choosing an easy target in Christianity instead of making art about Islam, but Chamaillard pointed out that she is "the fruit of a society with a long Christian history" but has no personal experience of Islam.

Interestingly, some Catholics were less offended than others. The editors of the Web site Narthex, which is run by the French bishops' conference and has "Art Sacré - Patrimoine - Création" as its tag line, answered a concerned reader's letter about the statuettes by pointing out that there was "certainly a generational conflict between the offerings of a young artist and the perception of an older person," concluding that "to my mind there is nothing blasphemous here, plus the object is decontextualized." After this open-minded answer caused a scandal of its own among the site's readership, Narthex took it down and replaced it with a statement that the site "absolutely does not support this artist or the Albane Gallery that houses her exhibition."