Sexuality

"The world will devour you...."

A group of cops laugh and talk, while scanning the street for suspicious activity. An extreme close-up of a sensuously exposed neck; a soft pink fleshy ear turns to reveal an inquisitive hostile eye....

The sonic fabric of 2nd Person, [originally] a multi-channel video installation, is formed through an array of women’s voices orchestrated as parallel tracks in a musical composition. The speakers, all women I have intimately known at different points in my life -- my child, my mother, my best friends, students, mentors -- talk with me about aging, growing up, death, motherhood, love and loss.

An animation developed from the collective experiences of a diverse group of LGBTQIA+ people to create a narrative. The result is a queer valentine having a fever dream.

An early example of video erotica from the Videofreex. A group of naked people lounge around smoking and listening to music. A male and female couple is making love on the floor in a room full of monitors.

The “a-ha experience” is the moment when a child first recognizes its own image in a mirror; it is critical to the development of intelligence and identity. It is also the moment when the “self” is surrendered to the control of an external influence. The child accepts the power of the mother to confer or withhold love; it is the mother’s power to fulfill desire that shapes a child’s sense of identity. Similarly, a camera controls love by directing or not directing its attention to the desiring subject.

At the heart of Alone With You is the notion of impassioned avarice, i.e. the kind of motivated acquisitiveness that drives both erotic desire and obsessive collecting.

"I'm not going to go to the Anne Frank House—I don't think I could take it—being a tourist is bad enough—though I'm not really a tourist—I'm here working—my camera's the one on vacation—taking holiday sounds and images—it's having a nice change of pace—for me it's still the same old thing—talking and talking.

"Ever on the lookout for learning opportunities, Reinke envisions an art institute where you don’t have to make anything, and with a library full of books glued together. All the information’s there—you just don’t have to bother reading it!"
—New York Video Festival (2002)

Primal urges and lofty aspirations saturate this lush excursion into the human landscape where internal battles rage – see pens spill forth poems – observe the paintbrush dripping passions, as writers and artists search for inspiration in the sordid depths of society and in spiritual recesses of the mind.

This title comprises Ruffled Spirits (2016) and Nightfall (2013) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.

Masked men prowling in the bushes and not touching anything but satin, dandelions and flesh.

Named after Harry Smith's seminal "Anthology of American Folk Music,” Anthology of American Folk Song re-inscribes the optimistically paranoid mythological landscape of contemporary America.

"They had been unable to believe in the existence of terrorists. After all, none of them had discovered any repressed memories of terrorist abuse. They had focused instead on the more immediate and real threat of serial killers, alien abductors and Satanic ritual abusers."

Jennifer, an intelligent but insecure 14-year-old student at a boarding school, seduces her married dormitory counselor, a photographer who has offered to teach her about his art and winds up shooting her in the nude. She is naive, and he manipulates her into an affair that eventually is discovered. Years later, as the photographer is being investigated by the FBI, the adult woman remembers her first love as a case of herself watching the artist who watched her.

A soft-focus close-up of mouth and lips is set to the sounds of lovemaking. A soft-porn video on how easy it is to get porn.

This title is also available on Ximena Cuevas: El Mundo del Silencio (The Silent World) and Half-Lies: The Videoworks of Ximena Cuevas.

"Exhibitons, whether of objects or people, are displays of the artifacts of our disciplines. They are for this reason also exhibits for those who make them, no matter what their ostensible subject. The first order of business is therefore to examine critically the conventions guiding ethnographic display..."

 - Destination Culture by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998

From an isolated wooded cabin a trans man star gazes, scruff chats with guys, watches YouTube tutorials, takes drugs, and lies about taking drugs - feeling his way through a cosmology of embodiment. Relative to the immensity of longing, the bodily insides become both portal and lens through which to probe the porousness between interior and exterior, the micro and macro. Nudes and landscapes are equally erotic, as Eros is an issue of boundaries: When i desire you, a part of me is gone.

The male/female, subject/object investigation in A Bit of Matter and a Little Bit More has no titillating introduction; the appetite is not whetted beforehand. Hardcore, the opening shot, shows the crotch areas of a male and female body engaged in coitus. At the end of the tape a male voice says, "Some questions and five answers relative to moved pictures, five questions and some answers relative to moved pictures—" a reference to the artists' book, 100 Rocks on a Wall.

Commissioned to be a "promo" for a loud punk rock band, Mr. Kuchar feared that the noise the band made would spoil the mood of his visuals, so he used the sound of a lush orchestra to score the picture and the antics.

"The title, A Boy Needs A Friend, is both a pathetic plea and just a fact."

 – Steve Reinke

"The content of the rogue computer animation Boy/Analysis is perfectly illustrated by the integral title, namely, a drastic abbreviation of Melanie Klein's 1961 key study on child psychology. The initial 93 sessions the psychoanalyst booked with a ten-year-old boy, are reduced down to 16 by Reinke, and thoroughly illuminated. Tumbling around, appearing and disappearing against a black background, are text fragments. A score from Benjamin Britten orchestrates this semantic ballet in which the most arbitrary associations can be made.

This video diary visits two sites that exhibited my visual works this past year, culminating at the VOLTA ART SHOW in N.Y.C., where I sold some paintings and a photograph.

The underling theme of the diary deals with some bloating, scarring and beefcake exposure while on the road to an acting gig where I'm scheduled to play a BI-SEXUAL, paraplegic in heat.

There are some in depth scenes of me working out the romance/sex routines with a young and attractive, male co-star. The all-girl crew appears to be getting off on the whole thing and I don't blame them!

To counteract the talkie I had done with graduate student the day before, this undergrad project has no dialogue but just a steady stream of images we dreamed up on the spot. A psychodrama that’s heavy on the beefcake, our picture deals with the sexual dementia of a sex addict undergoing hypnotherapy. It’s a mixture of fantasy and desire with some animals thrown in and lots of strange angles of the leading actor’s attributes.

"The life of objects intrigues me. Apparently inanimate, they adopt the souls, actions and lifestyles of their keepers. Here, a bed testifies to what goes on behind the closed door of a decent family's bedroom."

—Ximena Cuevas

Quoting Confucius, that “food and sex are human nature,” Chinese Characters builds a parallel between the Chinese legend about the search for the source of the Yellow River and contemporary Asian-Canadian gay men’s search for pleasure via their relationship to gay pornography. Advancing the positive value of pornography as a way to help fantasize and experience greater sexual pleasure and ingenuity, personal techniques are demonstrated and deployed in a High Noon dream of sexual adventure.

An experiment in placing lesbian sexuality in its most common environment, daily life. Dougherty's initial intention was to represent lesbian sexuality with an objective camera by getting rid of all expressive aspects of camerawork — no close-ups, no zooms, no interesting angles or changes in subject-object dynamic, just straight-ahead shots. In this video, Dougherty studies whether sexuality can be separated from erotica, and whether all depictions of sexual acts are pornographic.

The Colors that Combine to Make White are Important explores the power structure within a failing Japanese glass factory. Two parallel story lines involving the investigation of a suspected employee and that of a stolen painting converge to reveal an exposition on gender and desire.