Archive for category Winter 2010 News

Iulia Toacaci

From Feb 13th to March 6th, Lucky Gallery is pleased to announce “Daily Porn”, a pornographic bonanza of erotic books, collages, drawings, sculpture, and performance by artists Greg Beyer, Will Kurtz, John Lennon, Morgan Miller, Mark Mulroney, Kevin Muth, Hannah Nelson, Tara Sinn, Alix Sorrell, and Iulia Toacaci, exploring the ever-changing role of pornography in the realm of the contemporary art.

No longer confined to the pages of antiquity (Re: Petronius), the erotic has transcended into the world of mainstream media to become a propaganda tool and everyday commodity. Regardless of its highbrow/lowbrow underpinnings, we continue to create, display, question and enjoy images of desire both openly and secretly.

From the surreal eroticism of Salvador Dali to the kitsch eroticism of Jeff Koons, erotic art (in all its forms) has always inflamed public opinion. Even today, our supposed relaxation of the codes of behavior often rings false, as images involving nudity and the erotic are considered provocative, dangerous, and unwelcome in the public sphere.

Curated by gallery director Laura Arena and artist Iulia Toacaci, Daily Porn aims to explore and define what is erotic and titillating to different creative individuals, displaying a diversity of sensibilities and approaches that range from the humorous and raunchy, to the personal and the intimate.

The intent is not to criticize a direction or another, an attitude or a preconceived idea on the existence, the nature, and the social / political and economic implications of sexual imagery. The exhibition is not a re-action to people’s prudeness when it comes to exposure to sexual content and is not actively and consciously trying to educate an audience but reinforce something that everybody already knows, whether they agree with or not, accept it or not, and that sex and its visual representations have been part of our lives for as long as we can discuss consciousness.

To quote Henry Miller “obscenity, like sex, has its natural, rightful place in literature as it does in life”.