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Last Updated:
Jan 19th, 2010 - 13:22:35 |
Damned On Devil's Night
The Dark Art
Delving into the darker, deeper valleys of the psyche, bringing out those devious shadows by way of art, Damned is an artistic exhibition looking to light your internal fire, the one that burns on lust, desire and combustible sensuality. Devil’s Night will never be the same.
With contributing artists of the “fine” (and kinky) variety, this Devil’s Night deposition at the Hastings Street Ballroom combines several forms of visual art that all explore the nasty, the naughty and the devilishly disturbing.
Organized by one of our city's premier fetish photogs, DVS, Damned is breaking barriers while rejoicing in human primal perversions and the delights found in the dark corners of our souls. RDW caught up with DVS for some further insight.
Is Damned something new or is there a storied history to the event?
As for the history of Damned, this is our premier exhibition so, unfortunately, the show itself has no actual history. However, the producers, who are also artists, do have a history within the fine art erotic genre (MidWest Society of Erotic Photography mwsep.com, Detroit Erotic Arts Collaborative, Dirty Show) as well as kindred dark artist collectives (Syndicati Obscura syndicatiobscura.com) and more intimate exhibitions.
Cool, so what was the catalyst responsible for making this happen?
The creation of Damned began with the creation of an artist collective focusing on fine art dwellings within the darker realms of consciousness ... Syndicati Obscura, a dark arts collective; this invite-only collective features artists of a diversity of mediums that hold a deeper emotive and/or intellectual understanding and expressiveness towards the shadowed aspects of life and persona. The Syndicati’s plan was to gather every Friday the 13th and Devil’s Night for a group exhibition of our collective works.
But it grew into something quite bigger than that, with tons of talent stemming from across the country and even from Europe with the likes of the famed HR Giger (Alien artist).
Within my search for unique artists to bring into the fold, I slowly began discovering numerous artists that held amazing works within darker genres. So the direction of holding an intimate Syndicati Obscura gallery on Devil’s Night began evolving towards a larger exhibition of personally invited artists to display their creations within an event that now features a live “refined freakshow” performance within an elegant ambiance of ethereal soundtracks and live strings. The concept was quickly well-embraced and began flourishing with a life of its own as word spread.
Refined freakshow, eh? Sounds hot.
It is the intermixing of the extreme arts with the traditional ... the grotesquely repulsive with the sensually exotic: Flesh suspension with ballet, bloodplay with bellydance, fakir fireplay with something biologically anatomic in nature. All are performed as vignettes to a haunting solo violinist designed to enhance the ambiance of dark art and ethereal soundtracks.
Wow. I’m totally there. So, why Devil’s Night?
Damned is not Halloween-themed art but an exhibition within the exploration of the shadowed realms of consciousness. The title was both a play on the whole Hell/Devil’s Night theme, but more to reflect the eternal condemnation of self, the emotional trappings of personal hauntings or the immeasurable tendrils that bind us to our deepest longings or depravations within our art. Beauty does reside within the repulsive, and enlightenment within our darkest hours.
*****
Richard Kadrey is a celebrated author, journalist and photographer. He’s shot a ton of fetish and fashion and, in the “early days,” was a prime figure in the upstart of Suicide Girls. When Kadrey isn’t writing screenplays for Hollywood, he’s being a bad, bad boy with the likes of models like Nicotine — pictured to the left with an octopus. Disturbing? Indeed. Kinda hot? Absolutely. RDW loved this photo, so we got in touch with the man behind its lens.
So, you’ve been quite busy it seems.
I’ve been on the road, dealing with movie people in L.A. I actually write books, too, and they’re making one of my books into a movie.
Wow, congrats, man. I had no idea.
I’ve written a lot of science fiction and this new one is an urban fantasy — it’s my (laugh) it’s my attempt to be completely mercenary at what I write and make a lot of money. You know, I’ve written a bunch of books that no one wants to read and when I sat down to write one that people might actually like, it worked.
So, is photography the side gig?
I make most of my money off writing — the photography makes up for maybe five percent of my income these days. I’ve been doing both all my life. The kind of stuff I like to shoot doesn’t really bring in a ton of money. I just don’t want to have to do weddings. In photography, if you want to make money you have three choices: fashion, weddings and porn. I don’t do weddings and I’ve done a little fashion, but when I want to make money, it’s mostly shooting porn.
I checked out your Web site. Fetish? Yes. Porn? Didn’t see any.
The stuff you’ve seen is strictly the arty stuff that makes no money — but it’s the most fun to shoot. Porn is fun, but it’s because the girls are fun and have fun doing it. After the shoot though, it’s done, you make some money but you never think about the work again.
Tell me about the octopus photo.
Well, what’s really funny about that shot, and a lot of stuff I do with my models, is everyone thinks I make them do things and am really cruel to them, but at least half the time they’re coming to me with an idea already in mind. Nicotine called me up and said, “Let’s do something with an octopus!” The whole idea came from that hentai/anime stuff where there’s a ton of that tentacle porn out there in Japanese hentai.
Where’d you find the octopus?
Chinatown. I went to a few markets where I knew I might be able to get something so I found one and it required some arm-waving to get across that I wanted a whole octopus and when I found them, they were great, they were absolutely perfect. What they do is they wrap the tentacles around the octopus body then put them in the freezer and what happens is they end up looking like a big grey volleyball. We bought a few of those, thawed them out in the sink and just started playing with them. It was weird working with them. I cleaned them real thoroughly — there’s not ink inside — but they’re covered with a kind of mucous, they’re slimy and hard to work with. Even cleaning them a number of times, I found them to be real slippery.
How did you get into fetish photography? Kinky ex-girlfriend or something?
(laugh) Yeah, that’s how a lot of people start. I live in San Francisco and that’s where the Suicide Girls started out, so I shot for them. I had that one friend who was kind of crazy and fun and wanted me to shoot for them so we did something. It starts with that one person who just wants to take some pictures, but it goes further when they or the next person says, “Hey, let’s put this online somewhere.” I shot a lot of Suicide Girls for a while and that’s where I started really experimenting and playing with light and colors and things like that.
Seems like you enjoy implimenting the use of masks.
That’s just a personal fetish of mine — I like masks and I like gloves — nudity itself bores me. To me it comes down to that sorta hippie/natural problem — “everything’s better if it’s natural!” — no it’s not! Human beings make things, that’s one of the great things about human beings. So I like to start with something natural, the human body, then add something that was constructed by man.
Do you keep the journalistic side of yourself separate from the fetish/porn photographer life you live?
I used to keep both very separate and was very discreet about both, and then about six years ago, I got kind of fed up living two lives. I had a big break-up that came because of what I liked to do. I dated this crazy girl and, over time, she got more and more normal and objected to what I was doing. Along the way, I had stopped doing a lot of the fetish stuff ... for her. That drove me crazy — denying who I was. When that finally broke up, I made a decision to never hide either side of what I do. In the end, it didn’t really effect things too much and that was kind of the nice part — to find out that no one really cared.
I see a close relationship between Halloween and fetishism; everyone gets to role play a little.
I think that Halloween … and … if you ever have the opportunity to expolore the weird edges of Mardi Gras, not the stupid frat-boy thing, you’ll see that it’s really not all about dressing up, but more about getting to be someone else for a while. Now, if you can incorporate some of that into the rest of your life, that’s the big next step. But you can’t be afraid of it! A woman shouldn’t be afraid of saying, “I wanna fuck, but I want to keep my knee-high boots on," or "I wanna be blindfolded or wear a mask.” We probably only get to live once, so you have to push things further than you were taught to. | RDW
Damned • 10/30 • Hastings St. Ballroom
Obey me: thatdamnedartshow.com
Richard Kadrey: kaosbeautyklinik.com
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