GAYLETTER

A provocative photography exhibition is opening on July 25th at Leslie+Lohman Prince Street Project. The artists Walt Cessna and Natasha Gornik will present Sharp Objects, a showcase with a focus on sexuality and the male gaze. While New York based photographers, writers and bloggers Cessna and Gornik have collaborated before, this is their first show together — and it looks very promising.

The reception is hosted by MachineDazzle Flower, Brooklyn DJ David John Sokolowski will play music and a special performance by Paul Leopold (aka BOYWOLF).

To get a taste of what’s in store, check out their websites (Cessna and Gornik), then head on down to the gallery, and enjoy a cocktail served up by Cessna’s “super muse” Chad Ferro. I am glad they’s have a muse as bartender, some of those servers can be boring sometimes…

FREE, 6:00PM-9:00PM, Leslie+Lohman Prince Street Project, 127-B Prince St. New York, NY. …

Back in April, artist/writer/sex columnist/perfect porn star Colby Keller announced that he was being evicted from his apartment in Baltimore. Having called the city home for the last ten years, Keller saw the eviction notice as a sign: not only of the growing gentrification of the city, but one that also meant it was time to move on into the great unknown. For Keller, being the adventurous, gorgeous trailblazer that he is, that great unknown involves buying a van, a mattress, and a camera in order to travel across the US and Canada recording a porn in every state and province along the way. Aiming to do all of this in less than a year, Keller has now taken to Indiegogo for help getting this infallible venture on the road, with a slew of awesome perks to go with it.

The self-described ‘art-nerd porn icon’ has made signed postcards, t-shirts, personalized videos (as clean or dirty as you like), and original illustrations all available depending on how much you want to contribute to the project. If you’re feeling generous, you get a “Spanking Station” hosted by the bearded star in your hometown. If you’re feeling extra generous, you get to actually direct a porn with Keller and another model, wherever and however you want. It’s a porn aficionado’s dream come true, to say the least. He’s got a month to reach his goal of $35,000, so now’s a good time to start forking over your extra cash and/or life savings so we can all enjoy this extra sexy road movie together. …

Our friend and artist Stuart Sandford has been an artist-in-residence at the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles for the past few months. During his time there, “as a way of giving back to the foundation,” he collaborated with the famed porn actor Brent Corrigan creating 6 limited edition photographic prints to benefit the foundation. The images were all taken in Tom’s garden using an old Yashica T-5 35mm camera.

I had a chance to chat with Stuart about this project and he told me that the project started when “a mutual friend introduced me to Brent and invited him to the Tom of Finland House and gave him a tour, Brent was really excited and passionate about Tom and his work.” Stuart shared with me that he’s had a crush on Brent for years, “ever since I saw him in his first porn movies back in the gay, especially Every Poolboy’s Dream.” It seems like Stuart’s own dream came true. In preparation for the shoot, the artist and the model hanged out for a day, “drank some beers, talked about life, love, sex, art and took photos, which is the way I like to shoot, it’s all about the interaction between myself and the person I’m shooting.”

They’re planning on a few collaborations in the future, but in the meantime Stuart says they’ll hang out again soon in San Diego (where Brent is living at the moment) and ride horses bareback — “apparently it’s the best way to do it…although I heard it can be painful,” added Stuart. …

I was immediately struck by all the close ups of thick black cocks and spread ass cheeks in Christie‘s online only auction of Andy Warhol‘s male centric collection, up for just one more day, titled ‘Andy’s Eye Candy.’ The auction house has amassed over 100 photographs, prints and drawings from Warhol’s vast oeuvre. On closer inspection they provide a fascinating insight into the renowned artist’s sexual proclivities and personal relationships.

Even if you’re not buying, and I must say there are some very affordable pieces for sale, definitely have a look at the twenty pages of artworks up on the site. “This sale contains explicit content” is boldly printed on the title banner of the sale and I say “bring it on.” Drag queens, body builders, multiple ass and torso polaroids and a slew of “unidentified young males” are just some of the subjects Warhol aimed his stealth artistic gaze upon. There’s even a polaroid portrait of famed Stonewall drag queen and black american transgender rights activist Marsha P. Johnson. No wonder the sale is timed in conjunction with LGBTQI pride month.

One would think art historians and critics have left no stone unturned where Warhol is concerned but in light of ‘Andy’s Eye Candy’ it seems yet another layer of the elusive artist’s legend has been revealed.

Click here to bid! …

Early on in Ben Kline’s newest poetry collection, Going Fast in Loose Directions, a poem titled ‘A Minor Lament‘ opens with the following deceptively simple lines: “He unseated good sense. / The best lovers often do.” The declaration is purposefully economical, shortened to a mere nine words in order to speak in the simplest of terms to experiences of love and loss, desire and mania, sex and loneliness. Kline is adept at this trick of economy; none of the eighty poems that make up Going Fast in Loose Directions surpass two pages, and yet not a single one lacks for emotional depth or shrewd observation. Take the numbered sequences that recur under the titles ‘Propositions‘ and ‘Men I Know.’ Depicting blunt sexual advances in haiku form and ended relationships in free verse respectively, the numbered poems feel like interludes: sometimes steamy, sometimes heartbreaking, but always loaded with infinite possibility for what comes next.

It’s that sense of giddy unpredictability that makes Going Fast in Loose Directions, Kline’s first full collection to be published by Johnny Murdoc’s erotica micro-pub Queer Young Cowboys, so invigorating to read in the first place. Over the course of eighty poems, Ohio-native Kline offers readers a candid look at sex and love, detailing intense erotic encounters and damaging break-ups with matching elegance. Some of the poems, including the ‘Propositions‘ and ‘Men I Know‘ sequences, are culled from Kline’s Tumblr, Original Content Required, which serves as a public forum for writing exercises and selfies alike. …

My first job as an adult in New York City was working for this tiny PR agency but we had two big clients — Grace Jones and Peter Gatien who owned the Limelight. It was then back in 83′ at the tender age of twenty that I had my first experience of the mega paparazzo Ron Gallela. He came to everything we produced, invited or not, with camera in hand, pushing, shoving, maneuvering, and doing whatever he had to do to get the photo and he always delivered. I mean he even developed, edited, printed and serviced the images to the print media himself.

“In his nocturnal hunts Gallela captured New York as no one else had-from the melding of every strata of society into the disco demimonde on the same dance floor to the go go 80’s…” Ron photographed everyone everywhere! Marlon Brando, Liza, Halston, Naomi, Linda, Cindy, Goldie Hawn, Kurt Russell, Woody Allen, Bob Dylan, John Travolta, Al Pacino and most unforgettably his muse Jackie O. If my memory serves me correctly I think Jackie won a famous legal battle against Ron and she was awarded a restraining order against him whereby he could not come within 50 feet of her and 75 feet from her children. I mean christ, Time magazine and Vanity Fair dubbed him “The Godfather of the U.S. Paparazzi culture” AND Brando punched him in the face, (after some harassing I’m sure) breaking his jaw and knocking out five teeth! …

Are you staying in town this weekend? If yes, then you are in luck because the Whitney Biennial is up until Sunday, May 25th. This year the Biennial took “a bold new form as three curators from outside the Museum — Stuart Comer (Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art at MoMA), Anthony Elms (Associate Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia), and Michelle Grabner (artist and Professor in the Painting and Drawing Department at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago) — each oversaw one floor, representing a range of geographic vantages and curatorial methodologies.”

We went the opening week and still remember some of the works, well the ones that stood out to us. Here’s a taste of what we liked: Gary Indiana‘s grid of images and LED curtain. The grid is filled with photos of delicious men and their bodies, you even get to see penises.

Gary Indiana, Untitled (stanley Park), 2014. LED curtain, twenty-nine chromogenic prints and video, color, silent, 23:39 min. 

I dreamt about the following piece (below) by Steve Reinke with Jessie Mott, maybe because it had a religious reference and that stuff just scares me.

Steve Reinke with Jessie Mott, Rib Gets In the Way (Final Thoughts, Series Three), 2014. Digital video, color, sound; 53 min. 

We stumbled onto a pile of suitcases filled with resin by Valerie Snobeck and Catherine Sullivan, they were very memorable.

Elijah Burgher‘s drawing of naked men were simply intriguing. …