The series, Parlor Games ll: Proximity to a Dalliance expands on the ideas I was dealing with in Parlor Games in that it was informed by slapstick comedy and burlesque that navigates territory between humor, violence, sexually implicit/explicit subject matter, social satire, impulse, the id.
I feel this is an aspect of our humanity that is both ubiquitous and ubiquitously sublimated for the sake of civilized society, opposing our more primal selves.
It's a glimpse into our subconscious; a reveal beneath the facade.
Our culture is hyper-sexualized but it's a sanitized, Victoria Secret type of sexuality; perfect people having perfect sex.
There's something about sex stripped of any of it's alluring aspects that forces us to confront uncomfortable truths; this is not how we see sex reflected in our culture.
A thread that passes through all my work is a lamenting of the passage of time, deterioration, mortality.
The way we fetishize and aestheticize youth and beauty is a trope that we use to transcend and deny the passage of time and inevitability of death.
The sexuality in this work is not how we are spoon-fed sex in every corner of our culture.
It is primordial, less alluring, ugly, between not conventionally attractive people. It's sex that doesn't shy away from the submission, dominance, humiliation, vulnerability, exploitation and unseemly aspects of human interaction and by extension, the human condition.
This work doesn't stand by and lament this but in fact, confronts it, revels in it, laughs at it.