“You like to watch … don’t you?” Sharon Stone’s iconic line in 1993’s erotic thriller “Sliver” addresses the viewer as much as it does a character in the movie. Voyeurism in cinema is a theme long exploited by directors and writers. Films often like to address voyeuristic tendencies, whether through plot or aesthetics, but movies […]
Category: Erotic
10 Erotic Arthouse Films Exploring the Complexity of Love and Desire
Desire is fluid and fluctuating, and few forces are as powerful in their influence over our bodies and minds. Deriving from eros, the Greek word for desire, eroticism is the philosophical examination of love and desire as they manifest in literature, photography, film, and other art forms. Eroticism charges human stories with tenderness and connection, […]
Pretty in Pink! Photos by Prue Stent, Clare Longley and Honey Long
Note: Contains nudity. Like Christopher mentioned in a past post, “Prue Stent clearly has a favourite colour based on her fascinating photo series.” That same color continues to be a preference in her latest work called “Flush,” co-produced by Clare Longley and Honey Long and commissioned by Sugar Mountain Festival 2016. On the walls of […]
Passion and Performance in Christopher Pew’s Surreal Oil Paintings
Note: Contains nudity. In an oil series tilted “8,” Canadian artist Christopher Pew paints shadowy, dystopic scenes imbued with symbolism. Inhabiting the images is a cast of ambiguous characters; stark-nude, masked, and garbed in white, they are bound together by a scarlet scarf, signifying a fidelity of blood and sacrifice in the barren lands. Moving […]
10 Contemporary Canadian Artists Who Reimagine Frontiers
Canadian art has been historically recognized for its representations of the country’s magnificent landscapes. Near the beginning of the twentieth century, the Group of Seven set out to capture Canada’s cultural spirit by painting the transcendent force of the wilderness. Their work reflects the purity, beauty, and mystery of nature—the mythos of the untameable Canadian […]
Children of the Winter Forest: Dara Scully’s Poetic Photography
Note: Contains nudity. Dara Scully is a self-professed “forest-creature, winter child” who instills poetry into her haunting photography. Scully’s works are like gothic fairytales, exploring the human psyche through complex metaphors and esoteric symbols: nude figures lie in strange constellations on the grass, ghost-eyed children peer at the viewer, and dark forests encroach on the […]
Motelscape: A Surreal Full-Room Critique of Fantasy and Commodified Desires
As part of last year’s Art Basel Miami Beach, multimedia artists Marina Fini, Signe Pierce, Sierra Grace, and Sydney Krause created “Motelscape,” an otherworldly full-room installation located in a love suite of the Miami Princess Hotel. Every object was specifically designed to convey a sense of replicated and illusory reality, such as the translucent plexiglass […]
Dragan Ilic Di Vogo’s Symbolic, Hallucinatory Worlds
Note: Contains nudity. Dragan Ilic Di Vogo is a Belgrade-based painter who combines fantasy imagery with surrealism in passionate, dreamlike sequences. His deserts—inhabited by warrior women, stone angels, and floating objects—are reminiscent of the bizarre, symbolic landscapes of Salvador Dalí. With an ancient poeticism, Di Vogo’s works explore the edges of consciousness by dissolving the […]
10 Photographers Who Tell Stories with Controversial Imagery
Photography has long been a window into our social psyches, capturing not only scenes of beauty, but also the hidden underbellies of human experience: decadence, struggle, violence, passion, and despair. The word “controversial” is often used to describe these artists, because they rupture and/or critique the boundaries of normativity, thereby causing discomfort. Below is a […]
Stark Nude Tableaux Inhabit Olivier Valsecchi’s Newest Photos
Note: Contains nudity. “Drifting,” the title of Olivier Valsecchi’s most recent series of nude photographs, refers to gradual change, bodies in motion, a shift from one state of being to another. These photos are meticulously composed still lifes reminiscent of 16th- and 17th-century Flemish paintings, with starkly naked human bodies in place of luscious flowers […]