Arthouse Smut
Death and Sex
It’s been said that there are only two subjects worthy of art: death and sex. Of course, death and decay have been the central focus of my art since the inception of this project. My latest book, All is Vanity, represents the culmination of that obsession: more than 250 Vanitas still life arrangements accompanied by nearly 30k words of philosophical analysis. With that project behind me, I’m finally turning my attention away from mortality and toward that other great pillar of art history: eroticism.
My New Project
In order to keep a clean distinction between my death-haunted roots and my newer explorations of sexuality, I’ve built a brand new website:
The name “Arthouse Smut” should give some sense of where I see this project going over the coming months: my goal is to create trashy smut with the very same commitment to depth, nuance, and artistry that I’ve always strived to bring to my still life work. My new website is still very sparse; however, my approach to erotica already runs the gamut from tame boudoir-style imagery to abstract pornography to mannequin fetish content. As Arthouse Smut grows, I will continue to run roughshod over any distinction between high brow and low brow, between erotic art and pornography, between classical portraiture and commercial boudoir photography, between avant-garde experimentation and niche fetish imagery.
Coming Soon
For those of you who live in the GTA, I will have boudoir/kink/portrait sessions on offer in the near future. If you live elsewhere, or if booking a photo session doesn’t appeal to you, this newsletter will continue to be a home for whatever strange little project has consumed my interest. Over the next few missives, I will be building a case that fetish art is the only visual medium where the spirit of the avant-garde is still alive and well. And to prove my commitment to this bold claim, I will pour considerable amount of effort into a crafting a loving homage to an obscure DeviantArt user who posted a few dozen perverted images to that site nearly a decade ago.
There will also be a political component to this project. As much as I’d prefer to never broach that topic again, we are living in an era where politics has invaded every facet of our lives, especially in relation to sexuality, bodies, and gender. Overt fascism, moral panics about “spicy” literature, and prudish internet censorship campaigns have all become mainstream over the last decade or so. We are living in a time where queer folks all over the world—especially the trans community—are being stripped of their rights and threatened and harassed and pushed out of public spaces. We are living in an age of punishing beauty standards, of Mar-a-Lago face and tradwife influencers and SkinnyTok and bone smashing and Botox and lip fillers and leg-lengthening surgeries. Now, more than ever, it feels important to create art which unapologetically celebrates the diversity of human bodies and sexual expression. In times such as these, creating beautiful, weird, diverse smut is, in and of itself, a small act of political rebellion.
Call to Action
I’m building Arthouse Smut up from nothing. And I do not expect the all-mighty algorithm to look favourably on a project that centres sexuality, queer bodies, and niche/imaginary fetishes. More than anything else, at this stage I need to get my work in front of appreciative eyeballs. If you know anyone who might be interested in this project, please encourage them to subscribe, or to visit my website. You can also follow me on Instagram, where I will post updates and safe-for-work imagery. For those of you who are a bit more adventurous, you can connect with me on Fetlife, which is probably the only social media platform where I’ll be able to post uncensored content.
Until next time: Keep safe out there, my friends.
Stay tuned.
Things are going to get weird around here in the next few weeks…