Gina

I’ve been working on a prose poem called “Reasons For & Against Loving Me.” I can’t tell if it’s awesome or drivel.

Writing about break-ups and your own romantic anxieties in the midst of a Scorpio pink moon kinda means you just go for fucking BROKE, y’all.

Submit submit submit to this, visual artist friends! Last year’s show was stellar!

sexandculture:

Doing Your Dirty Work: a sampler of contemporary art about sex
Open to Artists in the United States

 “Doing Your Dirty Work” is the second annual group exhibition at the Center for Sex and Culture in San Francisco, California. We invite all artists that are at least 18 years old to submit recent artwork that deals with themes of sexuality, sexual identity and gender identity.  Please do not censor yourself. Nothing is too dirty! Nothing is too perverse!

The Center for Sex and Culture Gallery aims to provide space for artwork of significant merit that addresses sexuality and sexual identity, especially outsider or minority sexual identity. Too often mainstream art spaces self-censor or are afraid of sexual content. Too often the standard of artistic merit in sexuality community spaces is disappointingly low. Erotic art exhibitions are too often heavily hetero, cis, or white centric. CSC Gallery makes bridging these divides and providing a solution to these shortcomings its mission.

Jurors: Dorian Katz, CSC Curator and Marlene Hoeber, CSC Director of Collections

Submissions are due at midnight Friday, May 15th, 2013.  The show will be from Friday July 5^th through Friday, August 30^th.

To enter your work, send the following to sexandculturegallery@gmail.com:

• 5 images, jpegs less than 2mb each
• List of images with size, media and title (in the body of your email)
• Artist CV (attachment)
• Statement of up to 300 words about your work. Send one statement only and not one for each of the 5 images (in the body of your email)
• On the main page of http://www.sexandculture.org/ click on the green donations button on the right side of our main page to pay $15 entry fee through the option Doing Your Dirty Work. (Note that you have paid entry fee in body of your email.)

·       The gallery space also serves other uses so floor space is not available. We do not have equipment to present video work, but will accept wall-mounted video work with provided equipment. Wall-mounted sculpture is also acceptable.

·       In subject line of email, write “Art Submission – 2013

Deadline: 05-15-2013
Center for Sex and Culture
San Francisco, CA

Contact: Dorian Katz
email: sexandculturegallery@gmail.com
Website: http://centersexculture.org

Dirty Thirty. Wow.

I am happy and relieved to finally say good-bye to my twenties. But it’s not “good riddance.” It’s more “fond farewell.”

I have learned SO MUCH over this past decade. Also, let’s be real: I have accomplished a really impressive amount of cool stuff over this past decade, both personally and professionally. I’m not even gonna play at being falsely humble or modest here: I’m totally awesome and I kicked a lot of ass in my twenties. I was brave and forthright and honest and bright. Sometimes I made really stupid decisions, bad mistakes. Sometimes I was way too hard on myself.  

But sometimes I was really good to myself. Sometimes, I was bloody spectacular.

So many moments over this past decade were formative. Everything from leaving a horrible abusive relationship at 21 to starting Girl Talk at 25. Graduating college at 22, getting one of two Master’s Degrees at 29 (and being very well on my way to getting my second in May). Starting not one but two manuscripts. The shitty meaningless boring jobs and the work that I loved, the work that fed me. Getting published a lot, teaching a lot, performing a lot. Touring and doing college gigs. Meeting so many sweet people. Making friends who have become beloved family. Building towards actually making a living as a working artist. Bad awkward funny-story sex that still taught me a lot about my body and my boundaries. And the best sex of my entire life, the kind of fucking that left me humming and panting and alive with the utter possibility of the world. Falling in love a few times and becoming a better person for it. Learning so much every time my heart broke open.

But what it all boils down to is this: The biggest thing I learned in my twenties is How To Have A Body. That is the lesson that made all the other joys and discoveries possible. At 20, I was glassy-eyed and constantly underslept, anoretic and running on fumes. To say I was completely fucking dissociated is an understatement. My consciousness floated about 6 inches above my head at all times. Over the past decade, I have gone, slowly and painstakingly but surely, from floating above my head to actually being in my body all the time. To actually listening to my body.

Sometimes I want to send a picture of myself now to my 20 year-old self. She was so small and scared, so trapped and cornered, so hollow. I want to feed her everything she wasn’t letting herself take in — food and rest, safety and love. I want to give her a soft place to land, to remind her of what she deserves.  I want to say “Bella, abundanza. Look. Look. Look who you’re going to be and what you’re going to do. You’ll leave all of this behind and you will be so much better and happier for it. You are so brave.”

I’m looking forward to growing into my bravery and bad-assery in my 30s. And I wonder what 40 year old me will want to say to 30 year old me. What that picture will look like.

I bet it’ll be really good, whatever it is.

I’m in awe of Dorian Katz’s phenomenal curatorial abilities. Doing Your Dirty Work was a fucking amazing show, and I’m privileged & honored that I got to go take a peek at it today before it got taken down. Today, I’m also very much wishing that art about sex & sexuality was NOT ghettoized or treated as “less serious” or less important in the way that it often is. I say this not as a visual artist, but as a writer who mostly deals in the dirty, tender stuff, and who has had my own work called into question again & again because of the sexual content.

Art & writing about sex is RELEVANT! It is SERIOUS (except when it is funny or silly)! It is LEGITIMATE! It is IMPORTANT! It touches the very core of who we are & what we desire as humans! Apparently I have strong feelings about this!