Oculus is an intimate 10 min film focused on touch & connection created with my love Pale Crow Films You can purchase our film here
How one thinks about sex will depend on how one thinks about themselves. I understand this. understanding this is actually pretty fundamental to being naked on the internet, being an openly sexual being in this liminal and yet somehow eternal space created and maintained entirely by the tension around ideas. The tension between meaning and expression...
Meaning comes as a result of our encounters with the world. The meaning of sex makes this especially true because we see it as happening outside one's own body.
why sex, why porn...? this doesn't really matter beyond the boundary of myself and my body. That I do this and what I get out of it comes with a lot of public baggage, I live in two worlds - one of dull prosaic softness and one of bright complicated beauty - living like that means tending a lot of fences, keeping a lot of secrets.
I make art and porn to explore the meaning of myself. I don't think I chose sex as a subject so much as I respond to it. Art is conversation, a circle around the self that is closed by experiencing creation with others - interaction through what is created. I make art and porn not only to be seen but to show, to see others.
What is undeniable and also beautiful about this, at least for me, is the idea that I can allow the idea of myself to live inside as well as outside my body, inside and outside my control.
This is a lot like falling in love.
In porn and in love my body is open to meaning from others, and it can contain the meaning of others. Maybe that is why I never had sex with another person on camera. I was waiting. I have been making photo and video erotica for years now but I waited until now, sometimes around 37, to have sex on camera for the first time.
Oculus is a mirror and a window - it reflects an experience, it looks into myself.
I love this person, the sensations they offer me are a physical shade of emotion. In my body, in the world, I am filled with a vivid scene that I am not the source but the recipient of meaning.
The morning we shot, I was ravenous, but too nervous to eat breakfast, anxious to get started. Is it possible to live one's entire life so hungry, to be ravenous for all our days? Body humming I wondered if it was possible to want so much, so often, to always feel so divine.
When I first met them I tried not to be deceived by wanting. but want makes us think all nights are magic, desire shows us, not gently, how little power we have over ourselves. So of course with them, these moments of creation felt like magic. The kind that always lasts from twilight to dawn. This shoot, the days leading up to it, have been a span of empty hours just for us. Creating this took months - it is a reflection of months of talking across 2000 miles. Every moment of this film contains years, every kiss reflects a thousand kisses not given over 20 months apart, every touch is a thousand touches folded up like origami, waiting to happen...
We called it Oculus, a tight shot of two people tied in knots on the floor. A glimpse into something, mostly hidden, undiscovered, but also tender and obvious - unmistakable. just like us. Something so naked i can't do anything but offer what it was: early morning, hair unbrushed, no make-up, a pair of underwear they bought for me months ago. Sheer. Everything transparent. Every touch.
We fucked the same way I try to write this: with faith, hope on the skin, applying sensation to intellect and imagination to lust. I went forward into it and then was it.. done. And beautiful.
Emptying myself of everything but the grace to expose and want and renew an interior self, to become, to show everything. I didn't know I could make something like that. watching it, it feels very distilled. I thought we'd make something slick or stylised, maybe something even more abstract. but we ended up with something ... Naked, bare, stripped to nothing, more honest than I thought I (or porn) could be. A fall into grace as much as the hectic energy of new lust, of confused time and shattered perspectives. But perhaps I shouldn't be surprised, what better time to explore the self the when we try to embrace another?
I want to touch them. I want to touch them in the woods and the wetlands, on the hardwood floor, in my bed, in theirs...I won't know their impact on the time and space of my life as well as my body. I want to touch them with the rapid pitch and pace of knowing and unknowing, and I think you'll be able to see all that wanting if you look, our mouths and hands opening and closing like the opening and closing of our hearts.
The dream, when I make anything, is to touch an idea, offer a glimpse of my mind. Joy. I offered my body and searched their landscape and we captured harmony, pleasure in the body of another other, tied together with arms and strands of hair, insides and outsides touching. Interpretation of the another on film, in our hearts, on our skin, or in a mirror requires observations, focus...
We watch each other. we show.
We are seen
