Vex Ashley

Hazy, dreamy, breathlessness. Gasping, exhaling.

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 invisible lines that bind us together become tangible.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.