Vex Ashley

Why do we like to be called Mommy? The archetype of mother looms over us across cultures, it’s powerful and ubiquitous so it’s unsurprising that it can show up in our sexual psyches.

Softness and wetness and opening yourself up. About consuming and feeding, being merged and joined. One consuming the other, both folding into each other, temporarily one.

Sex 'fuses' bodies, entering, penetrating, consuming, holding, manipulating physical forms to remove any space left between us, pushing through spacial boundaries to experience an intense and vulnerable closeness and combination. 'Fuse' also references electricity, electrical currents and overload, whereas Carolee Schneemann shot her film Fuses in 1967 on analog 16mm celluloid we make films, fuck and communicate using digital, electronic devices, currents flowing across continents onto screens - now more than ever in the wake of the pandemic. A film made in lockdown isolation that honoured the potential future collaborations missed and explored new ways to fuse and fuck across distances. Bodies projected over and merging, the light from them captured through lenses into binary, transmitted across distances into shimmering pixels on screens thrown in beams of light onto and into another body.

Set in the 1600s, a group of women are filled with an uncontrollable desire to run, touch, and tear themselves apart

You're getting fucked without even knowing. Fucked behind your back. Fucked in the shadow of your absence.

Sleep is such a vulnerable state, it requires a complete letting go of control. Slipping out of waking consciousness into another world. A world controlled by an unpredictable subconscious that loves to play tricks on you. Watching someone fall asleep is to see them move through different states of being, exposed and unaware.

The body and all it's interiors. Pushing back against the idolisation of the body as an immutable object to be sanitised and preserved. Not a doll to be put on a shelf and admired. The body - not as a temple - but a playground to be entered, spread, explored. Slippery openings, spit and flesh and hair. Playing in the mess. Limbs merging, breaching the boundaries of the internal. Entering each other, going where you shouldn’t, merging form.

An exploration in narcissistic desire, a kind of autoeroticopsis in being the subject of desire for yourself.

There's something so special about adult films pre internet digitization, VHS tapes copied and circulated in your community, mailing lists and screening parties and brown paper bags were the distribution model. The intimate privacy of a time capsule contained in a black plastic film cartridge, hidden in the back of a drawer, labelled as something inconspicuous so as not to arouse suspicion - hidden treasure.

A Botticelli made flesh, two artist’s models in the studio sitting for a painting, laid out in the sun. Marble statues draped in sheets, wetness and warm summer air, gold, green grass on skin, the hum of insects.

Jealousy is a visceral emotion. Being driven to distraction and loss of control is akin to slipping down the rabbit hole, a descent into hell. Safety morphs into paranoia. Perception of reality becomes unfixed. Full collapse. Desperation can become an intense crucible for obsessive desire.

Erotics are not found in revelation but in walking towards knowing in the darkness, down a long corridor, in a labyrinth, in the maze but never quite reaching the centre.

Not fucking but being fucked. Being taken. Taken out of your brain and into your body. Sex that knocks sense out of you for a second. Where you’re weightless and grounded, pinned and stretched. No pleasantries, no thinking just being and doing. Guts, sweat and pumping blood. Giving up and giving in to your body.

Folk Horror as a film genre explores the power of ritual, stories passed down through generations and long forgotten. Taking sanitised modern life and peeling back the mask to expose the dirt, the earth, our connection to the old ways. Exploring the darkness in the woods, the power of the land, the earth and it’s strangeness, everything about our landscape and existence that’s remains unsettling and unknown.

We broadcast our image in cells and pixels across continents, viewed by lenses, pushed through codecs and compression algorithms, adapting new ways to circumvent the physical. Thousands of people every day fuck and fuck themselves broadcast live via webcam. I spent 4 years from 2012-2016 live online, executing a carefully choreographed performance of authenticity - shapeshifting, adapting, morphing. My sex and self monetised for consumption, working for tips. Records of this will outlive me, videos of cam shows ripped, recorded and uploaded on illegal sites, digital time capsules or ticking time bombs. We exist in a system that commodifies our personhood, our images, our data and our lives online, to harness that isn’t freedom from it but it can be control.

Wilhelm Reich’s mythical Orgone Accumulator: part science experiment, part esoteric fuck machine, part reverse glory hole.

Erika Lust presents Old But Gold

Momentum, moments, movement mix together in bliss.

Visual distortions mixed together providing and interconnectedness found only within another's embrace

All that glitters is gold, images built in the pooling trails across skin.

The act of penetration at its core is invasion, sometimes intensely and acutely desired and begged for and sometimes more complex. The sensation is intense and can be entirely changeable depending on the context in which the act takes place. This film is about invading and consuming. The monotonous, sterile mechanics of the fuck machine is hypnotic, the unwavering noise and repetition of movement that’s entirely oblivious to desire or want. It continues to thrust and fuck regardless.

Tender kisses, sharp nails, and desire laid out in a bed of flowers

Our orgies are acts of ritual celebration that against the odds, somehow, still here in the writhing and intertwining of smoke, sweat and bodies.

Connection through shattered mirrors, black paint, candles, and cold cement

A taboo dive into divine nature providing a reminder of what greater connections we possess with the things around us

Transgression in the form of unyielding bodies melding together and the rebirth of self it causes

The thiasus, was the ecstatic retinue of Dionysus.

You're watching everything pass you by but you're separated, removed from the outside world by a pane of glass, sealed in your own private reality. Time moves differently inside. You're able to observe and be observed by other drivers that pass but you're each just watching from inside your own tiny parallel universes. Surrounded by these endlessly travelling lights and shadows, ghosts of the outside creeping in. Inside a moving prism of glass and mirrors reflecting cycling scattered images from another time and another place.

Treating bodies like botany, in intense, investigative close up, scientifically graphic, reveals them at their most intimate but also maybe their most anonymous and dissociated.

The serpent deceived me, and I ate. Celebrating what is tactile, smooth, and sticky.

A transference of energy; an exothermic reaction. The marks are product. A way of distilling intangible energy into physical permanence. Skin is the carrier and the canvas.

All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.

The process of turning base material into gold, the philosophers stone. A metaphor for the way certain acts and bodily materials are treated as obscene and base and how powerfully transcendent they can be transforming them into elixir, into gold, something precious.

It’s about the pull, the draw, of the visceral sensation, the gravitational pull towards the centre of the black hole. So potent that it’s magnetism has an effect even when it’s not necessarily you engaged in the physical action. The call of the void.

Unyielding urges dressed in warm light under the cover of darkness

It wasn't night and it wasn't day, but some lurid third interval that had suddenly slipped between them and would never end.

We broadcast our image in cells and pixels across distances, viewed by lenses, pushed through codecs and compression algorithms, adapting new ways to circumvent the physical and connect.

A muted record of beginnings

To share and consume the liquid form of communication with another

The act of giving up control; devotion and subjugation. Dual states of purity and sin. The ritual of transcendence. The undertones of tension that are imbued in repression and reverence.

A forced perspective through lips

How are we consumed through one screen and fed back through to another. Shot using an iMac, a Macbook, Skype, the TV, an iPad, and an iPhone, or as the director puts it, "all the consumerism."

Adjoining mouths find connection within each other... and a popsicle

A meditation on obscenity, censorship, the body, excess and restriction, fakery and reality. The series is based loosely around the alchemical process of The Great Work/ Magnum Opus - the process of turning base material into gold, the philosophers stone.

The history of traditional portraiture is about status and branding. With this portrait we were interested in breaking down those layers of constructed perfection. Initially in renaissance portrait painting, women are often pictured in a profile view, detached and passive. This painting was one of the first to have the female subject confronting the viewer, meeting your eyes without appeasing or smiling. There are parallels in the expressions in this film and in the painting.

Moments only captured in the sun

Highlighting the intricacies lost in convention between two people focused solely in themselves.

You're never too old for playtime... but here the games go beyond hot! With this collection, Erika Lust has brought together the best of her short films that deal with the topic of role-playing games for adults. From kidnapping to doctor games, this XCompilation leaves nothing to be desired. What is your role-play fantasy? Is it doctors or kidnapping? Would you like to spice up your marriage with a little cheerleading action? Or do you wish your husband would pretend to be an aggressive Viking? The gorgeous Tyler Nixon gives us a cowboy strip in Magic Magnus that's enough to raise anyone's temperature, while Poppy Cox and her lover indulge in some sexy dirty talk. So hold on tight and strap on your fake moustache, because everyone gets to play here.

In these 10 brand new films you'll see: a cunnilingus master in a fun artsy film, the sensual powers of wine, the chronicles of a moaning neighbor, self-pleasure watched through a Go-Pro camera, an undying desire for big breasts, a striptease on Finnish tango, ass-less chaps dancing to lust, an incredibly hot BDSM story, the kinkiest threesome, and the first anal sex scene ever at XConfessions. Included: Be a Hero; The Ultimate Kink; Try My Boyfriend; Wine is the Best Lubricant; My Moaning Neighbor; His Was First in My Ass; Titty Titty Bang Bang; Chicazo; Dominate Me; Magic Magnus.

A diverse range of fantasies; gourmet erotica, a seductive femme fatale, and three short films from Guest Directors. Also included are the stories of a dirty doctor and a motorcycle hitchhiker; circus performers, interpretive dancers and witches; and an ode to the ultimate emancipation, female ejaculation. Included: A Lethal Femme Fatale; Dirty Doctor; The Bitchhiker; Meow Kittens Orgy; Somos Solo Cuerpo; Circus Aerius Perversus; Carne; Female Ejaculation; Horny Beasts; I Put a Pagan Spell On You.