Home > Events > Media Arts

Two works by Los Angeles-based queer artists explore the relationship between architecture and desire.

Trinity Square Video and Inside Out are pleased to co-present The House That Lust Built, an exhibition curated by Jon Davies. The House That Lust Built juxtaposes two utterly distinct yet complementary articulations of sex and space. William E. Jones’ work presents an underground aesthetic of illicit, small-town sex, in contrast with the Toxic Titties’ utopian sexual fantasy video. Between them, they generate productive tensions between public performance of sexuality and deviance. Toxic Titties member Heather Cassil will be in attendance at the opening reception.

William E. Jones’s video Mansfield, 1962 (2006) re-presents surveillance footage shot by police in the eponymous town in Jones’s home state of Ohio. As part of a sting operation, the police hid in a public washroom to surreptitiously record its denizens having sex. Men of all races and ages move furtively around the stalls, appropriating it as a grubby temple of eros. Blissfully unaware of the camera, the men’s democratic space of secret sex is shattered by the police’s optical invasion.

At Home with the Toxic Titties (2006) is a film by the Toxic Titties and Dorit Margrieter set in John Lautner’s modernist Sheats-Goldstein Residence in Beverly Hills. Typically used for Hollywood movie and advertising shoots, it serves here as the headquarters for a group of decadent lesbian superheroes. Transforming it into “a messy stronghold for rogue genetic engineering, sexual escapades, glamorous parties and plots for world domination,” their rowdy exploits contrast sharply with the house’s ultra-clean geometries.

Bios
Born in Canton, Ohio and based in Los Angeles, filmmaker William E. Jones edits together sequences from vintage 1970s and 1980s gay porn to create a discursive arena in which to consider the desires implicit in sexual imagery. His short films are at once explorations of the complexities of homosexual identity and nostalgic recollections of an erstwhile gay culture drastically altered since the onset of AIDS. For the most part editing out hard-core scenes, Jones allows his pieces to focus on the language of body movement and even landscape as sites for subtler fantasy and romanticism. His filmography includes Massillon (1991), Finished (1997), The Fall of Communism As Seen in Gay Pornography (1998), Is It Really So Strange? (2004), All Male Mash Up (2006), V.O. (2006) and Tearoom (2007), which is currently at the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

The Los Angeles-based Toxic Titties is a collaborative group of feminist artists working with performance, video and film. Using pleasure and play, the group mutates with each performance to include a multiplicity of participants and embody queer perversions of cultural ideals. The Toxic Titties have appeared as camp counselors (Camp TT, 2001), the ultimate target market for new family values (Ikea Project, 2001), nude models (Beecroft Intervention, 2001), police officers (LATT, 2002), blushing brides (Toxic Union, 2002), a feminist militia (Toxic Troopers, 2003), high society art patrons (Be My Patron, 2003) and members of a lost art movement (The Mamaists, 2005). Toxic Titties is a project of artists Heather Cassils, Clover Leary and Julia Steinmetz, plus an ever evolving tribe of performers, designers, musicians and starlets.

Getting there: Richmond Street, east of Spadina Avenue

For more information contact: Aubrey Reeves
Phone: 416-593-1332
Email: aubrey@trinitysquarevideo.com

© torontoarts 2002 -2005