The Seattle Erotic Arts Festival
May. 2nd, 2010 08:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsOmaha and I volunteered to run the photo booth at SEAF, where we were to man the computers. Apparently, we were the most computer-savvy people they could rope into the deal.
It was actually a lot of fun. We had the day-shift, which wasn't terribly busy, but was fine throughout the day. We had a lot of very beautiful people come through, in all ages from their anxious mid-20s to their self-assured late 60s. The rules didn't allow for nudity, sadly, but I saw several handsome young men with their shirts off. Apparently the big events happened at night-- performance art and fashion shows, and some demonstrations of the darker leather arts.
I picked up both volumes of The Virgin Project, an incredibly sweet and yet sometimes disturbing collection of interviews with how individuals lost their virginities, all rendered in exquisitely sensitive comic form. I suspect Scott McCloud would approve. They are a perfect representative of the comics as a way of communicating memoir stories clearly.
I can understand why some of my friends who submitted didn't get in. The art reached for the status of art and often reached pretention. If it didn't aspire to communicate something other than "sex is fun," it wasn't on display. Sam Cobb's collection of oil paintings embraced being kinky even into old age and decreptitude; Brian M's photographs of an armless woman with large artifical breast implants were a defiant stab at the idea that the handicapped are nonsexual. Some artworks were accepted simply due to scale: Nancy Peach had big, bold canvasses, but her work was casually heterosexist in theme, so much so that its inclusion was almost ironic. Michael Alm's "Furries Get Together," a tableau of statuettes in fursuits, tried to imply that furries were ordinary people under their clothing, but somehow also managed to say that ordinary people under their clothing can be unpleasant to look at-- the opposite from the values mouthed by SEAF's parent organization, the Center for Sex-Positive Culture.
I did like several pieces there. Christopher Carver's piece "Stephanie" was basically a giant wall-covering poster of a close-up of a rather ordinary vulva, but if you got close to the image you could see it was done in four-color with the "pixels" being silhouettes of bunnies and kittens. Jonathan Wakuda Fischer's "Midnight's Request" appealed to my crotch well, a woodcut rope bondage scene with an animesque feel to it done in woodcuts and paint. And Emily Steadman's oil paintings were sweet and wonderful outdoor love scenes without a touch of irony of desperation.
The best pieces there were the beds, constructions of wrought iron, one made of Gieger-like spines; another of beautiful stainless steel, technological but not gridded, not rigid, a nice place to have sex; and a third in dark steel, gorgeous machine-cut silhouettes of oak trees.
The theme of this SEAF was evocative of other emotions using the erotic as a vehicle, and not necessarily erotic works by themselves. It was certainly not the kind of bondage reportage photography that has been prevalent in the past. Some of it was good, and there was a lot of very skilled talent on display, especially in the constructions and installations.
One thing still blows my mind though: Norwescon was a sponsor (although their name was spelled wrong on one of the flyers, it's correct on the website). Okay, there's a lot of crossover between the pagan, kink, and SF communities in Seattle, but that much seems confessional and a bit over the top.
It was actually a lot of fun. We had the day-shift, which wasn't terribly busy, but was fine throughout the day. We had a lot of very beautiful people come through, in all ages from their anxious mid-20s to their self-assured late 60s. The rules didn't allow for nudity, sadly, but I saw several handsome young men with their shirts off. Apparently the big events happened at night-- performance art and fashion shows, and some demonstrations of the darker leather arts.
I picked up both volumes of The Virgin Project, an incredibly sweet and yet sometimes disturbing collection of interviews with how individuals lost their virginities, all rendered in exquisitely sensitive comic form. I suspect Scott McCloud would approve. They are a perfect representative of the comics as a way of communicating memoir stories clearly.
I can understand why some of my friends who submitted didn't get in. The art reached for the status of art and often reached pretention. If it didn't aspire to communicate something other than "sex is fun," it wasn't on display. Sam Cobb's collection of oil paintings embraced being kinky even into old age and decreptitude; Brian M's photographs of an armless woman with large artifical breast implants were a defiant stab at the idea that the handicapped are nonsexual. Some artworks were accepted simply due to scale: Nancy Peach had big, bold canvasses, but her work was casually heterosexist in theme, so much so that its inclusion was almost ironic. Michael Alm's "Furries Get Together," a tableau of statuettes in fursuits, tried to imply that furries were ordinary people under their clothing, but somehow also managed to say that ordinary people under their clothing can be unpleasant to look at-- the opposite from the values mouthed by SEAF's parent organization, the Center for Sex-Positive Culture.
I did like several pieces there. Christopher Carver's piece "Stephanie" was basically a giant wall-covering poster of a close-up of a rather ordinary vulva, but if you got close to the image you could see it was done in four-color with the "pixels" being silhouettes of bunnies and kittens. Jonathan Wakuda Fischer's "Midnight's Request" appealed to my crotch well, a woodcut rope bondage scene with an animesque feel to it done in woodcuts and paint. And Emily Steadman's oil paintings were sweet and wonderful outdoor love scenes without a touch of irony of desperation.
The best pieces there were the beds, constructions of wrought iron, one made of Gieger-like spines; another of beautiful stainless steel, technological but not gridded, not rigid, a nice place to have sex; and a third in dark steel, gorgeous machine-cut silhouettes of oak trees.
The theme of this SEAF was evocative of other emotions using the erotic as a vehicle, and not necessarily erotic works by themselves. It was certainly not the kind of bondage reportage photography that has been prevalent in the past. Some of it was good, and there was a lot of very skilled talent on display, especially in the constructions and installations.
One thing still blows my mind though: Norwescon was a sponsor (although their name was spelled wrong on one of the flyers, it's correct on the website). Okay, there's a lot of crossover between the pagan, kink, and SF communities in Seattle, but that much seems confessional and a bit over the top.
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Sort of Yowlers, but with dinosaurs
Date: 2010-05-04 03:20 am (UTC)Re: Sort of Yowlers, but with dinosaurs
Date: 2010-05-06 04:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-16 11:19 pm (UTC)--Christopher Carver
You are cruel to think that my work is heterosexist
Date: 2010-05-23 11:50 am (UTC)You have no idea how my work is created and I have just the opposite to say about the LGBTQ communities.
You have started something that I will need to finish, but I won't do it right now.
I want to talk to you about this post.
You are not right.
Here is what is said about hetersexist in the dictionary.
HOW DARE YOU!!!!!
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Heterosexism is a term that applies to a system of negative attitudes, bias, and discrimination in favor of opposite-sex sexuality and relationships.[1] It can include the presumption that everyone is heterosexual or that opposite-sex attractions and relationships are the only norm[2] and therefore superior. Although heterosexism is defined in the online editions of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language and the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary as anti-gay discrimination and/or prejudice "by heterosexual people"[3] and "by heterosexuals"[4], people of any sexual orientation can hold such attitudes and bias. Nonetheless, heterosexism as discrimination ranks gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people as second-class citizens with regard to various legal and civil rights, economic opportunities, and social equality in the majority of the world’s jurisdictions and societies.