Maman II

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.

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.

The blinding light of someone's adoration burns out their ability to see inherent human complexity and messy contradictions and hypocrisies.

While traveling in Paris, author Henry Miller and his wife, June, meet Anais Nin, and sexual sparks fly as Nin starts an affair with the openly bisexual June. When June is forced to return to the U.S., she gives Nin her blessing to sleep with her husband. Then, when June returns to France, an unexpected, and sometimes contentious, threesome forms.

You're watching everything pass you by but you're separated, removed from the outside world by a pane of glass, sealed in your own private reality. Time moves differently inside. You're able to observe and be observed by other drivers that pass but you're each just watching from inside your own tiny parallel universes. Surrounded by these endlessly travelling lights and shadows, ghosts of the outside creeping in. Inside a moving prism of glass and mirrors reflecting cycling scattered images from another time and another place.

All that glitters is gold, images built in the pooling trails across skin.

Sleep is such a vulnerable state, it requires a complete letting go of control. Slipping out of waking consciousness into another world. A world controlled by an unpredictable subconscious that loves to play tricks on you. Watching someone fall asleep is to see them move through different states of being, exposed and unaware.

Hazy, dreamy, breathlessness. Gasping, exhaling.

Jealousy is a visceral emotion. Being driven to distraction and loss of control is akin to slipping down the rabbit hole, a descent into hell. Safety morphs into paranoia. Perception of reality becomes unfixed. Full collapse. Desperation can become an intense crucible for obsessive desire.

Barriers are an augmentation not just a limit - they have potential for new sensations. Bodies take on different qualities. Smooth, shiny tactileness. Cold or warm when in contact with skin. Transmitting sensation without faithfully replicating it.