Heiros Gamos
HIEROS GAMOS
My work has always ridden outer bounds of that censorial badland where art crosses into erotica. Hieros Gamos, which refers to a sacred union, is a body of photographs of couples and bodies in water filled with collected tropicalia, in which my intent is to explore the erotic and even romantic directly, rather than as a side note to an exploration of gender, body politics, and power. My interest, however, lies as much in the spiritual, transcendent, existential nature of the erotic as in the prurient. I also think it is extremely important to explore the erotic from a female gaze, countering the lopsided nature of the current pornographic landscape that still constitutes so much of the visual consumption of humanity.
I view these works in the context of Ecstacis, altered states of consciousness that bring one into that rapturous godlike state where the self and time seem to disappear, and the struggle of life suddenly seems effortless, a state accessed through meditation, sex, psychedelic substance, ritual, or extreme sport for instance. Borrowing heavily from the East both in a philosophical as well as compositional sense, I use water, breath fog, or home-made lens filters to create an uprooted spatial plane in which there is a confusion between primary and reflected realities, and often between what is in front of and behind the pane of the camera.