There's something so special about adult films pre internet digitization, VHS tapes copied and circulated in your community, mailing lists and screening parties and brown paper bags were the distribution model. The intimate privacy of a time capsule contained in a black plastic film cartridge, hidden in the back of a drawer, labelled as something inconspicuous so as not to arouse suspicion - hidden treasure.
This is an exploration of screens and how they translate the visceral flesh of sex and bodies and what that now means today in an age of digital pornography. In short, fuck being reduced to 'muse' - in art, in porn, in life, whatever.
To get into the mess and fuck in the wreckage. To give over to pure physical sensation and stare into the void of atrocity, oblivion. The body as machine - like a crashed car - of both powerful possibility and freedom and impotent, crumpled failure. Pain and pleasure heightened by the tension pulling at our own survival instinct.
The act of penetration at its core is invasion, sometimes intensely and acutely desired and begged for and sometimes more complex. The sensation is intense and can be entirely changeable depending on the context in which the act takes place. This film is about invading and consuming. The monotonous, sterile mechanics of the fuck machine is hypnotic, the unwavering noise and repetition of movement that’s entirely oblivious to desire or want. It continues to thrust and fuck regardless.
We record, broadcast and replicate our images on an unprecedented scale. Observing and seeing.
Both raised with Catholicism to varying degrees and both devout femme dykes, their relationship weaves the symbolism and practices of the church with BDSM and service to mine the complicated, painful history of religion’s relationship to queerness for intense explorations in suffering and intimacy. Eroticising shame has always been used as a powerful tool for healing and freedom in queer spaces, expanding what sex and intimacy can mean and be outside of straight normatively leads to deep explorations in bonding and trust outside of societally prescribed doctrine. Sex can mean and be and do many things and it can be written and rewritten according to need, a tool used to explore rather than something functional and fixed.
The act of giving up control; devotion and subjugation. Dual states of purity and sin. The ritual of transcendence. The undertones of tension that are imbued in repression and reverence.
Why do we like to be called Mommy? The archetype of mother looms over us across cultures, it’s powerful and ubiquitous so it’s unsurprising that it can show up in our sexual psyches.
The history of traditional portraiture is about status and branding. With this portrait we were interested in breaking down those layers of constructed perfection. Initially in renaissance portrait painting, women are often pictured in a profile view, detached and passive. This painting was one of the first to have the female subject confronting the viewer, meeting your eyes without appeasing or smiling. There are parallels in the expressions in this film and in the painting.
You're getting fucked without even knowing. Fucked behind your back. Fucked in the shadow of your absence.
The body and all it's interiors. Pushing back against the idolisation of the body as an immutable object to be sanitised and preserved. Not a doll to be put on a shelf and admired. The body - not as a temple - but a playground to be entered, spread, explored. Slippery openings, spit and flesh and hair. Playing in the mess. Limbs merging, breaching the boundaries of the internal. Entering each other, going where you shouldn’t, merging form.
Treating bodies like botany, in intense, investigative close up, scientifically graphic, reveals them at their most intimate but also maybe their most anonymous and dissociated.
Our orgies are acts of ritual celebration that against the odds, somehow, still here in the writhing and intertwining of smoke, sweat and bodies.
Softness and wetness and opening yourself up. About consuming and feeding, being merged and joined. One consuming the other, both folding into each other, temporarily one.
A Botticelli made flesh, two artist’s models in the studio sitting for a painting, laid out in the sun. Marble statues draped in sheets, wetness and warm summer air, gold, green grass on skin, the hum of insects.
The role of submissive, and the potential for transcendence in consensual degradation is powerful. Endurance is powerful. Subverting perfection is powerful.
Porn aesthetics and archetypes are fascinating, sex on film has always been innovative, at the forefront of pushing technology and creativity. Being pushed to the margins means you’re forced to make new rules and create your own visions, processes and traditions. Porn world developed its own visual language, signs and semiotics.
Abjection is a complicated, multifaceted concept that this person is going to do a much better job of beginning to explain than me. It explores how we define ourselves as living and where that border is. Things that are abject exist on that border; hair, menstrual blood, shit, fur skins and ultimately, corpses. Demarcating what is alive and what is not.
Sleep is such a vulnerable state, it requires a complete letting go of control. Slipping out of waking consciousness into another world. A world controlled by an unpredictable subconscious that loves to play tricks on you. Watching someone fall asleep is to see them move through different states of being, exposed and unaware.
The history of traditional portraiture was about status and branding. With Atrophy Portraits we break down the layers of constructed perfection. These films are an exploration of power and submission, how the boundaries between those roles might initially seem fixed but can be more fluid. What it means to be the subject, to be observed and to meet that gaze. This film is a portrait, designed to be watched on a portrait screen, for example your phone. A portrait needs a frame and our screens are our frames.
