Tag: masturbation

Vixen – Seduced by a Local feat. Jia Lissa & Christian Clay (2018)

There are things this video does well (an emphasis on communication and by dint an implicit consideration of vocal affirmative consent and what appears to be a real honest to goodness female orgasm) and things it’s not so great at (the blocking isn’t as bad as other porn but it’s underwhelming to know this is film in beautiful, coastal Greece and the location is de-emphasized in favor of the typical canned porn shoot lighting).

All that being said: I have been following Jia Lissa for several years now and I am definitely a fan of her work.

She started off doing solo softcore and artsy masturbation videos, moved to working with other women. To the best of my knowledge this is her first straight sex scene and her first with Vixen.

As to why I’m a fan–when I first encountered her, I think I’d have said that I thought she was just unusually my type. However, I’ve been realizing that what I held up as my type previous to coming out as a trans girl, has more to do with a projection of how I view my self in my own mind’s eye.

So I have mixed feelings about this video. On the one hand, it’s the first time I can recall her legitimately orgasming in a performance–meaning she’s not a lesbian like me. (Also, I adore the blue dress she’s wearing in the first part of this video–alas, it’s not an outfit I could ever pull off.)

But I watched this whole scene from start to finish without fast forwarding because I am really into how uncomplicated her enjoyment of sex comes across as well as her expressions–both with regard to mien and pillow talk.

I’m sort of curious if her comments in the video about going to art school in Moscow are her character or her–because she’s always struck me as someone I’d love to collaborate with on some sort of art project.

After seeing this I only want to collaborate with her even more and even if that never happens, I suspect Lissa is going to eventually gain the notoriety of someone like Sasha Grey or Stoya, honestly. She’s both intriguing and has a luminous on screen presence.

insideflesh – artificial pleasure (2018)

At present, my brain is a hectic, swirling mass of chaos–my first semester as a graduate art student is spinning up and I’m not as lucid as I would prefer. (As a result: things with this project will be fairly scattered for a couple of weeks–thank you all so much for bearing with me.)

I don’t have a clear piece to offer you about this image. I mean: I freaking love it. But as I’m looking at it trying to figure out what about it I want to point to as being the thing or things that draw me to it–it’s the usual: a simple, straight-forward conceit, executed in a matter-of-fact fashion; also, I both wish it was an image I made; or, even better: I wish it was an image of myself.

Looking at it the only place my brain keeps returning is to a point a member of the sculpture faculty made about how he feels that one of the biggest hang-ups contemporary artists have with struggling to fit their concept within a particular form–when the concept would become for less complicated if it were perhaps applied to a more complimentary form.

His point was that there’s a natural tendency to play to our strengths as creative folks. But there are times when our ideas will be expressed more clearly in a form with which we are perhaps not so well versed.

And I think the inverse of that notion applies to insideflesh–I would be very hard pressed to point to work with a better synergy between concept and execution (form, aesthetic, tone, resonance of meaning).

Natalia Nobile – [↑] Untitled (2017); [↖] Untitled (2017); [↗] Untitled (2018); [↗] Untitled (2016); [+] Untitled (2017); [→] Untitled (2017); [↙] Untitled (2017); [↘] Untitled (2016); [↓] Untitled (2017)

I don’t necessarily like all Nobile’s work. I’ve been wanting to share some of her work for a while, I just haven’t had the time to really sift through her work until this afternoon.

I sat off drafting this post with the notion of talking about parallels between her work and other similar image makers. However, I realized at a certain point that at face value her images are compelling because of their immediacy.

What we are being shown is clear enough–it’s the why we are being shown it that remains ambiguous. But why we’re being shown what we’re seeing is less of a preoccupation than questions like are those Frida Kahlo panties? Cyrano or Elephant? Is the woman straddling the bedpost posing; additionally, is this pose supposed to suggest something vaguely masturbatory? Are those cannabis plants?

In the picture of the woman in the pink body suit on the bicycle looking back over her shoulder while feigning the fastening of her helmet struck me as having exquisite color rendition. Same with the are those pot plants one.

But organizing them together in this way showed the extent to which Nobile is using color with subtlety and style. It also shows that although you don’t necessarily realize it that color not only ties her images together within themselves, it actually ties her work together just as well as a signature.

Yulia Nefedova – Untitled (201X)

Nefedova’s style is akin to what you’d get if you locked the guy who made Where’s Waldo in a room with nothing except Toilet Paper Magazine back issues, American Apparel catalogs and reams of blank paper.

In other words: casually irreverent, audaciously transgressive and charmingly warped.

Yet, what makes the work singular is its curiosity. I don’t think I’ve ever really seen people doing most of the things Nefedova documents hers as doing. And there’s this wonderful ambiguity about whether she’s asking herself I wonder what this would look like vs. I know what this looks like because I’m just drawing from what I see in my own life–an ambiguity frequently complicated by her tendency to draft her own likeness into her visual experiments. It’s not always easy to determine whether these self-referential flashes are tongue-in-cheek jokes or confessions.

Source unknown – Title unknown (201X)

I’m not entirely sure if this is an actual instant photograph or if it’s one of those Photoshop jobs where someone takes a Polaroid mask and overlays it against another image.

The reason I’m not entirely sure is because this acts like a Polaroid–the compressed tonal range (essentially slight overexposure on the model’s stomach, the rest of the skin tone is more mid-tone and then everything falls off to black except for the back of the couch in the upper left third of the frame and the edge of the couch on the lower right), slight chromatic aberrations at the left and right edges as well as the almost selenium-ish tone.

I’m generally not fond of work that decapitates and amputates limbs but with this there is a sense that less was intended as more. (I’m not sure it completely works from the standpoint of eschewing the problematics of depicting women nude as a coding for presenting them as sexually available but the composition is self-consciously voyeuristic enough that I suspect this was made in such a fashion to at least implicitly complicate notions of sexual availability as necessarily passive.

Source: picturepolaroidporn