Vex Ashley

Hazy, dreamy, breathlessness. Gasping, exhaling.

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.

Represented reflections of bodies linked in union and their spiritual connection.

All that glitters is gold, images built in the pooling trails across skin.

The thiasus, was the ecstatic retinue of Dionysus.

An exploration in narcissistic desire, a kind of autoeroticopsis in being the subject of desire for yourself.

A purification ritual, salt and water.

The invisible lines that bind us together become tangible.

Flux is the conduit for transference of energy.

You're watching everything pass you by but you're separated, removed from the outside world by a pane of glass, sealed in your own private reality. Time moves differently inside. You're able to observe and be observed by other drivers that pass but you're each just watching from inside your own tiny parallel universes. Surrounded by these endlessly travelling lights and shadows, ghosts of the outside creeping in. Inside a moving prism of glass and mirrors reflecting cycling scattered images from another time and another place.

Visual distortions mixed together providing and interconnectedness found only within another's embrace

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.

Sex 'fuses' bodies, entering, penetrating, consuming, holding, manipulating physical forms to remove any space left between us, pushing through spacial boundaries to experience an intense and vulnerable closeness and combination. 'Fuse' also references electricity, electrical currents and overload, whereas Carolee Schneemann shot her film Fuses in 1967 on analog 16mm celluloid we make films, fuck and communicate using digital, electronic devices, currents flowing across continents onto screens - now more than ever in the wake of the pandemic. A film made in lockdown isolation that honoured the potential future collaborations missed and explored new ways to fuse and fuck across distances. Bodies projected over and merging, the light from them captured through lenses into binary, transmitted across distances into shimmering pixels on screens thrown in beams of light onto and into another body.

A taboo dive into divine nature providing a reminder of what greater connections we possess with the things around us

Exploring porn performer Carmina's complex relationship to her Mexican/French heritage saturated in Christian iconography and ideas of purity and what it means to be a “good girl” Her upbringing merged with the culture of her porn community and her bisexuality to explore what it means to exist simultaneously in those spaces, without feeling like you totally fit into any. Shame and sex and freedom and acceptance in the shadow of the history, iconography and symbols that have surrounded her her whole life.

Not fucking but being fucked. Being taken. Taken out of your brain and into your body. Sex that knocks sense out of you for a second. Where you’re weightless and grounded, pinned and stretched. No pleasantries, no thinking just being and doing. Guts, sweat and pumping blood. Giving up and giving in to your body.

We record, broadcast and replicate our images on an unprecedented scale. Observing and seeing.

Indulgence in it's first form

Barriers are an augmentation not just a limit - they have potential for new sensations. Bodies take on different qualities. Smooth, shiny tactileness. Cold or warm when in contact with skin. Transmitting sensation without faithfully replicating it.

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.

Transgression in the form of unyielding bodies melding together and the rebirth of self it causes

The intersection of Femininity and The Grotesque, when femme-ness, glamour, glitter is exaggerated to the point of excess, stomach-turning glistening, gluttonous, grossness. Gorgeous with emphasis on the gorge.

It wasn't night and it wasn't day, but some lurid third interval that had suddenly slipped between them and would never end.

Long moments of brushed skin melting within each other