EXPLICIT FANTASTIC at Keep Six Contemporary (938 Bathurst), from today (Thursday, October 9), reception 6-10 pm, to November 30. 647-436-6594. Rating: NNNN
In what promises to be more a festival than an actual exhibit, curator Rafi Ghanaghounian of Keep Six Contemporary has enlisted a dizzying array of international and local art stars to contribute to Explicit Fantastic, his exploration of the state of sexuality. Not content to show just erotic art, he’s also included film, sculpture, performance and an intriguingly named Dirty Laundry reading series.
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In what bills itself as an alternative show on sexuality, local talents hold their own as topographers of the expanding psychosexual terrain. A show like this wouldn’t be complete without Bruce LaBruce, Shary Boyle, Peaches, Thrush Holmes, TILT and Fastwürms, to name but a few.
LaBruce mines our trashy erotic media fantasies with his blood-spattered Twink porn images, fit young boys treading the dangerous edge between sex and violence, while Boyle contributes several of her delicately disturbing sculptures of young girls undergoing erotic mutations that appear to have sprung spontaneously from our surreal collective id.
New York represents with recent photos by none other than Richard Kern, the controversial photographer and “occasional pornographer” of New York Girls fame.
On Friday (October 10) and October 24, R.M. Vaughan moderates two film nights entitled Not So Blue Movies, giving us a chance to view erotic and not so erotic shorts by Keith Cole & Michael Caines, Kelly McCray, Lisa Pereira, Deanna Bowen, Kirsten Johnson, Dayna McLeod, Scott McEwan and Michael Holmes, Pete Dako, Natalie Wood and Peter Kingstone.
Plus, Louise Bak hosts two guerrilla DIY erotic reading series to be held at local laundromats (locations to be announced), where people can listen to dirty stories by local writers, among them Sean Dixon, Joey Comeau, Zoe Whittall and Tamara Faith Berger, all while sorting their lights and darks.
It’s time to start saving up your dirty laundry.
art@nowtoronto.com
