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Readings Tue Aug 06 2013
Art, Lit and Conversation Hook Up at Slippery Slope
If art is highbrow, pornography--conventional wisdom would have it--is so lowbrow as to be practically simian, a distant and disreputable evolutionary relative. And yet there's much in its cultural condition for any artist to envy. Art is looked at, literature is read, but porn is consumed. It commands and engages the senses directly and deeply; its utility, at least, is never in question.
Curated by writer, artist and sometime sex worker Robin Hustle, Slippery Slope takes porn aesthetics and plasters them on the walls of Woman Made Gallery (685 N. Milwaukee). The show's been garnering rave reviews since it opened in mid-July, and on Thursday, August 8, at 6 pm, it expands its gloriously messy genre-mixing in an event that will include a reading from Megan Milks, chats with multimedia artists Sarah Weis and Noelle Mason, and a screening of stag-film title sequences drawn from the Chicago Film Archives' collection.
Milks plans to read from her collaborative project-in-progress Traumarama, inspired partly by the collections of fluid-centric girlhood embarrassments familiar to any reader of Seventeen magazine. (The project will soon debut on Tumblr, adding to a body of work that so far has included the Sweet Valley High riff Twins and the short book/long story Kill Marguerite, which will anchor Milks' forthcoming first collection of fiction.) Stop by what she calls "a cool mixed-media, mixed-mode feminist/queer event" and get seduced, grossed out, or moved to thought. Probably all three.