There is an opening in the forest where wild beasts lay to bathe in the moonlight
Tonight, under the void moon, it is only us
The dark moon draws you to the holographic water, to the edge, to drink
The darkness brings safety, we are the nocturnal animals
We lay here, gravity slows
Her touch skin her smell the sounds she makes, wetness touching a threshold, glistening,
a breaking point
the river rushes avalanche, overflows fountain press
ultrasonic waves,
abyssal puddle undulates,
circling out wide and back into each other,
drifting in the wetness,
light beams into underwater waterfalls, the garden of paradise
RECLAIM PARADISE
We go back to the beginning. For the first 30 000 years of human terrestrial life, God was a woman; we always knew to worship her. At some point along our long history, the patriarchy inserts the biblical narrative where tasting Eve’s fruit sires man’s expulsion from Paradise: The Fall. This incites their dominance over our bodies, our sexuality—women’s fruit, the serpent—cast as the devil, destructive and punishable temptation. Man is our innocent accomplice to whom we owe our Edenic loss, for whom we veil our erotic bodies and to whom our sexualities are owned. The effects of our fabled act justifying our ongoing sexual oppression. We go back, here, and expose the doubleness of meta-history to take our power back. We reclaim atemporal Eden and re-press the clay, this is a parallel paradise, ours. We unravel and reorganize the story patriarchy tells, there has never been a Fall. This place is a Sapphic world, a feminine universe, and here in Paradise we have sexual and erotic autonomy. Our bodies are sites of investigation, sex acts, pussy sex, sensuality, pleasure, the power of the erotic. We hold our power in its intensity; in its generativity and recenter what was taken from us and used against us to its rightful place within each of us.
PARALLEL PARADISE, AN ALTAR TO EROTIC POWER
The installation of Parallel Paradise is arranged to evoke a sacred space, an altar, a place of ritual for the veneration of the erotic. The central altar is the exhibition's main focus, a circle surrounded by ritual objects and erotic iconography. Reclaiming the ritual objects and ritual elements of catholics, who stole it from an older world. There are the four elements on a Catholic altar (Candle, bread, blood, bible) as well as the older worlds, in ours here we have: The abyssal puddle, WATER, incense burner, FIRE and AIR and the plates also called patens EARTH.
A dark moon, hovers above the water, rippling its reflection in the water, the wetness a sign of arousal for women –cum, juices, gushing here the Abyssal Puddle, is a gentle invitation to lie down and view the exhibition from this position, surrounded by representations of pleasure. The shimmering holographic tactile print on the carpet is soft and large enough for two people to lay on, to float in the soft and slippery abyss. This allows for a shift in perspectives and various views to exist simultaneously. We touch tails. In this work, the luna moths are nearly imperceptible on the bottom of the bronze sphere. You would have to be lying down on the carpet to see them. They are nocturnal animals and familiars of the darkness. The moth and serpent, also undergo transformation like bronze, like the resin, like ourselves. The bronze undergoes a transformation in fire, like the oak forests, and like the pine resin incense that smells of the forest. This bronze sphere holds the power of smoke and fire. Using bronze denotes sacredness and acts as a material reference to other ritual objects of ceremony. There is weight to the sphere although it fits in the palm of your hand. Opening the sphere reveals its ceremonial purpose, with a delicate grate and hollow centre to burn incense. The Touching Tails Ultrasonic Safe Psychic Space Incense Burner reclaims the censor from the christian lexicon. It rev erberates at the edges of sight, sound and smell. We light fires in our sacred space. We fill it with smoke and the smoke fills us. Aromatic smoke draws on subconscious visceral responses and reflects our intimacy with the world. The smoke is erotic, and connects us with our deep somatic appetites (Strand). Aromatic smoke delineates the space separate from linear time; the resin tumbles over and drips onto the forest floor, leaving our mark with fire in the darkness.
At the edge of the carpet is a pair of bronze patens Eat of my body, Snake Swallows Snake Patens. The paten is the sacramental object for offering the body, used by the catholics. In this parallel paradise we serve each other fruit off these patens, offering each other the body, pussy. Carved into the bottom is the emblem of the Snake Swallow Snake Cult. When the patens are in their ritual position, the snakes are pressed against the darkness of the earth. When they are lifted to serve each other, there is a brief coming to light. When the two patens are stored, they fit into each other. Two bodies of the same shape fit together.
A series of film photographs and ceramic altars encircle the altar. The repetition of many similar objects denotes the space sacred. A continuous circle of clay sculptures surrounds us in the space, arranged in pairs along the edges of the void. The clay pieces undulate in waves. These are clay reliefs of oak bark, clay to tree, pussy to pussy, layered together in rhythmic pairs, split enfolded. We depict this sex act with two pieces of clay touching each other, drawing on the clay’s association with the body. The clay and tree press into each other and hallow pussy on pussy; pine resin drips down along the edges of the sculpture like the sap running down a tree. Dripping, shimmery, rushing, gushing. These reliefs are glazed in misty layers of blues and greens. The iridescent glaze creates a surface effect of shimmering holographic serpent skin. The glaze is mid-fired to highlight the earthly shimmering aliveness of the clay and the tree in this story becomes a sacred grove that we touch.
The Snake Swallows Snake photo series and the Held Up by the G-Spot Fountain photo series, are displayed as triptychs. Iconographic screens surround the altar in a layout we recognize as sacred. Velvety photographs speak to an ongoing transformation that takes place in darkness. Six large format photographic prints layer nighttime trees in bloom, sapphic bukake fountains making mist in the thunder and lighting rain, and serpents sliding along the edges of darkness and each other.
The ritual begins with breaking bread, sharing our bodies, and eating fruit together. Our presence in the space and eating the fruit invites participation in the work. Candied, dried, and fresh fruit arranged in collaboration with artist Sid Starkman creates a luscious wet element, referring to the act of cunnilingus on pussy, colloquially known as ‘fruit’--or for a christian-raised queer, ‘forbidden fruit.’ A subtle invitation for participation, we eat together, contemplating what eating fruit could mean.
Competing ideologies of religious iconography and explicit erotic sexual representation press against a threshold of representation. Cycling through symbols from previous worlds, the christian stories are obfuscated by the void; no longer the dominant narrative, the symbols release their previous meanings and represent something new.
Using structures and strategies from religion to generate a place of transformation and ritual in the group -eating together, drinking together, gathering in a circle, burning incense -we evoke these strategies to build a sense of connection. With a hedonistic attention to pleasures of the senses, we invite a collective nervous system response. When a community comes together and feels a loss of individuality and sense of unity with the group, this is what Victor Turner calls “communitas.” The exhibit is an invitation for collective effervescence (Durkheim) between our attuned nervous systems as we drift into the safe space of the abyss.
In my thesis exhibition Parallel Paradise, I invite a multiplicity of sensory beings (people), from the (unknown) public, to inhabit the world as receiver, as the site and setting for unknown relational interactions to happen, to weave. Alive with other people, the gallery space becomes populated by many world-makers as they indulge their pleasures and senses. The story becomes a multi-layered collective of ideas focusing on tone and atmosphere over logic–a circuitous movement through time and space.