HOTTER THAN JULY
NY STUDIO GALLERY
154 STANTON, NYC
MAY 2 - 9, 2014
‘What holds
the world together,
as I have learned from bitter experience
is sexual intercourse’
-Henry Miller
“It is only by sacrificing everything to sensual delight that the miserable
individual known as ‘man’ can manage to sow a few roses amid the
brambles of life” states Marquis de Sade in Philosophy in the Boudoir
as he speaks to all the libertines in the first section of his infamous work.
Two hundred and four years later, Catherine Breillat presents Romance
X, a woman’s cinematic search for hidden sensual delights. Breillat, the
film’s director, subverts the borders of the obscene and the innocuous
for the sake of artistic expression.
Art and sexuality have always walked hand in hand since a prehistoric
man carved human genitalia on a cave wall. Initially used as a medical
term to define prostitution for hygienic purposes, the notion of pornography --or sexual depiction, only gained its contemporary understanding
in the Victorian era. Similar to artistic creation, in sexuality resides a
self liberation and the discovery of ‘the other’. In an interview, Michel
Foucalt once said, “We have to understand that with our desires go
new forms of relationships, new forms of love, new forms of creation
and sex is not a fatality; it’s a possibility for creative life.”
Unshackling one from the limits of materialistic reality, both art and
sexuality yield safe arms to those yearning for what’s beyond the
visible. In her book, D.H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study, Anais
Nin observed that Lawrence wrote Women in Love as an escape
from the horrors of war. Hotter Than July: Eat Your Art Out undertakes a conscious getaway from all the mundane bitterness present
towards the realm of sensuality. Through a roster of artists, each
charged with a burning desire to set any canvas or video screen
into fire, this exhibition promises the feeling of a dirty tango on a
fiery dance floor.
Curated by Savannah Spirit, Hotter Than July: Eat Your Art Out is
the second installment of 2011’s highly scandalous Hotter Than July:
A Sexploration. Bringing together twenty-five contemporary artists
working in a wide range of mediums, this exhibition investigates
sexuality in today’s world while tingling viewers’ five senses with
tender yet rampant attacks. In an era when the internet is sabotaging human interaction and STD’s are haunting every mind, Hotter
Than July: Eat Your Art Out strives to p resent alternative yet familiar
paths to look at the rawest and the most carnal part of the human
reality, while querying new interpretations of human interaction.
In Me Into You Keren Moscovitch questions the dynamics of an open
relationship while blurring the definition of intimacy, individualism
and morality in a society in which codes and taboos are of the determinator forces. Trevor Guthrie’s Terms of Endearment is a charcoal work on paper reading ‘I’D FUCK ME’ as covered with blinks,
humorously satirizing everyman’s self-indulgence and never ending
search for intimacy through a masturbatory quote.