About this project

About this Project

We are Ela Darling, Zoe Voss, and Dylan Ryan and we are all adult performers who share an interest in art. We are collaborating on a project that will explore the relationship of intimacy in art and hopefully question some of the boundaries between what is considered art and what is considered profane.

We all live near the arts district in our cities and have a near constant exposure to art. We were noticing that a lot of the art that sells today looks more like comic books than traditional art. We love comic books (immensely), but we felt like this art is missing something. It seemed to us that, while pop culture inspired art was more accessible to people, it lacks the sort of dialogue and meaning we like to see in art. Good art should be a centerpiece for discussion. It should point out hypocrisies in our culture. It should create visceral, emotional reactions. We wondered: could we make art that addresses relevant pop culture themes, challenges some traditional ideas, and creates emotional reactions through intimacy, all while maintaining a more traditional art aesthetic?

We will be making 15 foot scroll images using screen printing ink and water color paper in a method called Contact Body Printing. The work is made by coating our skin with ink and directly pressing our bodies onto paper. We want to present this project in a large format at an art gallery show. To us, the work is about commodification of the body, and the blurring of the line between art and pornography.

We will be working with an established artist, Victor Wilde, on this project. Victor has experience in a wide range of mediums and disciplines. 

Victor has received acclaim in areas such as performance art, fashion design, painting, sculpture, photography, and conceptual art.  We hope that Victor’s experience with medium, as well as his understanding of composition and form, will help take our work to new heights of beauty.

Here are some small-scale examples of our prints:

Why We Need the Money

We want to make at least 15 large full body representations to display at an art gallery show. Each of these large prints will require:

• One roll of archival paper ($150)
• One 16 ounce bottle of Block Printing Ink ($50)
• Various application tools ($20). 
  
• A location large enough to accommodate the messy production process.

Additionally, we need to fund:

• The Behind the Scenes DVD production
• T-shirt printing
• Various rewards costs. 

Some of the money will be used to fund promotion of the gallery show too. Getting the word out to people and opening up this dialogue is a major driving force behind having the gallery show in the first place.

The more money we raise, the bigger and better the gallery show can be!

Your Rewards

When you back our project for $25 or more, your reward will contain an original, personalized print created by the model of your choice. You get to choose which body part we print for you with the sole exception being the face/head. If our project is successful, we will send a message to all of our backers requesting your shipping info and model/body part preferences for your print. 

Please add $10 to your donation if your shipping address is outside the US.