Dirty opens Saturday, June 9th

For years, Heidi Neff watched hardcore porn videos, closely examined S&M and fetish magazines, and studied the details of female orgasm. What she learned is documented by her paintings: the gaping mouths of screaming pornstars, tantric sexual positions, threesomes, blowjobs, handjobs, and more.

But Neff’s “dirty pictures” are more than sexual provocation. In her newer work, now on display at Sub-Basement Artist Studios, Neff substitutes the pornography of hardcore magazines for the equally dirty images of American politics.

Neff has invented a “Manuscripts” genre, a body of work focused on media-hyped natural disasters, global warfare and national tragedy. There are images here of a Pakistani earthquake, the flaming Twin Towers of 9/11, nuclear testing in North Korea. Each painting resembles an old illuminated manuscript, with bold colors, flat detail and intricate lettering.

She is joined in this show by Jessie Lehson, an installation artist who also creates “dirty pictures,” but with actual physical dirt.

Lehson collects dirt – from places around the world. Friends and family send her packages of soil on an ongoing basis. In her newest installation, Lehson creates a fountain using dirt collected from San Jose, Calif. It is “cinnabar,” a type of soil whose rich history can be traced back to Mayan civilization, where it was used as a symbolic source of blood in royal burial tombs.

Here a pump cycles dirt from floor to higher level and back again, as if it were a bloodstream in a beating heart.

And so the Dirty of this new show at Sub-Basement Artist Studios is equal parts physical and metaphoric. Below, underfoot, is the installed geometry of Jessie Lehson, whose autobiographical work exposes “the dirt” of her own life in such naked literalness it forms a pornography of the private self.

And above, on the walls, are the political and pornographic works of Heidi Neff.

The power of this show is the space in-between, the area we traverse as viewers, where the bridge from Neff’s history of dirty politics to Lehson’s portrait of dirty secrets is satiric tribute to America’s public and private fascination with filth.

Please join us for opening night on Saturday, June 9th, from 6 to 8 p.m. We’ll be serving wine and hors d’oeuvres.

“Dirty” runs from June 9th to July 7th.

To learn more about this show, click here. ** LINK TO ESSAY **