Earthly Pleasures

ASMA, Bayo Alvaro, B. Anele, Katherine Blackburne, Brianna Rose Brooks, Lex Brown, Ficus Interfaith, Enzo Iwase, Manal Kara, Amelia Lockwood, Abigail Lucien, Sean-Kierre Lyons, Lila de Magalhaes, Devin N. Morris, Armina Howada Mussa, Anousha Payne, Alina Perez, Alexandria Tarver, Kim Westfall

If the first red pill was the apple Eve ate, we are situated after its consumption, but before the shame. Orient yourselves to a sacred moment, strategically excluded from the text of scripture: man’s earliest ecosexual impulse.

We can assume that Eve was pleasured by the forbidden apple, by its flavors and juices running down her throat, by its flesh sliding around her tongue and in-between her teeth. We can speculate that without the internet, Eve had the time and attention span to look closely at orchid blooms and split peaches, recognizing that her bodily forms were echoed in their structures and that she, too, was of the earth. We can interpret her decision to trust the serpent’s recommendation as a radical act of inter-species kinship, born out of a profound understanding that on a material level, the two are not so different.

Long after the beginning of time, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens published the Ecosex Manifesto, a public pledge to love and make love with the earth until death “brings us closer together than ever”. By drawing attention to the sensory and erotic pleasures earth’s resources can satisfy, sexecology encourages a tender approach to environmental activism. It is important to note that while Sprinkle and Stephens coined the term, their philosophy builds upon millennia of indigenous cultural attitudes towards the natural world.

Arranged together, the works in this show attempt to visually queer the Genesis myth by foregrounding sensuality, rejecting human dominion, and promoting a pure and harmonious relationship with our one resplendent planet. Apart from aesthetics, we invite you to consider certain approaches to art-making as ecosexual in nature: lathering pigments, fondling clay, rearranging earth with love and care.