Sex Toy Project Volume 1

Volume 1 of the Sex Toy Project: Photographs of Artifacts and Sites. The project stems from queer discourses and politics to look at how sexuality is lived and experienced in private lives; specifically, how the queer sexual act is mediated by objects, sites, and related ephemera. The images aim to address the concomitants of the sexual (play, erotics, fetishization, the transgressive vs. the normative) and how these emerge through pockets and subcultures of the gay community. In doing so, they employ the language of the still-life, as both a photographic and painterly artistic tradition, allowing for an exploration of the metaphoric, symbolic, and psychological. The objects and spaces become, for example, anthropomorphic stand-ins for a sexual identity wherein the erotic can be seen as a site of performance. Mirrors, fabrics, and modes of concealment act as echoes of the perennial closet or as dissonant,uncanny objects that intermingle fantasy and fear for those looking in from the outside.