DIVINE PORN: The Four Chambers of Vex Ashley
The line between art and pornography has long been a contentious issue within the creative community — with pornography at times be overlooked, swept under the proverbial carpet, in favour of more cultured artistic pursuits. However, for independent porn producer and performer Vex Ashley, pornography is a beautiful and highly creative source of inspiration for her work. A medium that has merits in itself. With her Four Chambers project, she has created a series of independent, conceptual and creative films that touch on a deep reservoir of cultivated culture, from psychoanalytic concepts to the experimental visual art of Carolee Schneemann.
Vex Ashley’s aims are bold and ambitious, attempting to reclaim significance for pornography and decentralise the entire process, taking back power from the traditional practices of the pornographic industry as a whole. No longer are the films solely produced by a single demographic, but through her Four Chambers project, a new perspective has been unleashed, pushing the boundaries of what porn is really capable of showing and articulating.
With a background in analogue photography, digital sex and art school, this coalescence of stimulating fields has resulted in Vex Ashley creating a truly unique viewing experience that encapsulates many positive points of the avant-garde and DIY culture. GATA took the time to talk to this ambitious creative force, in an attempt to understand the roots of this project, and the various visual references and energies that are expressed in her work.
“Sex is fascinating because it’s simultaneously an object of cultural fascination and disfunction. There are very few areas of making art that still feel like they have somewhat unexplored territory, sex is maybe one of them?”
Hello Vex, thank you so much for your time. First of all, could you please introduce yourself to the GATA Family?
Hi GATA, I’m Vex, I’m a visual artist, director, performer and independent porn creator with my DIY porn project called Four Chambers.
You’ve come from a creative background, utilising analogue photography and graduating from art school; how exactly did you get into performing?
I always wanted to create; my artwork often centred and featured my own body as a site of visceral exploration, influenced by artists like Carolee Schneemann, Ana Mendieta, Helen Chadwick and Francesca Woodman who all used their physicality, their naked body and their sexuality as vehicles to create.
I started exploring sex work online as both a way to pay my way through university and as a way to push and explore the use of my body. I started making films as Four Chambers to see if I could bring the same focus on aesthetics and concepts to pornography, as I was doing with my artwork.
Sex is fascinating because it’s simultaneously an object of cultural fascination and disfunction. There are very few areas of making art that still feel like they have somewhat unexplored territory, sex is maybe one of them? It’s been used, talked around and touched on but rarely explored explicitly and without boundary. It’s such a huge part of what drives us, what makes us human and yet we keep it in the shadows or push it to the margins, which means it’s still such a rich seam of untapped creative potential and exploration.
When did you step into the erotic world, and how important was it for you to do it?
Sex and eroticism to me is magic, it has the ability to tap into the deepest, most base and primal parts of our psyche and also simulatenously connect us to something that sometimes feels almost transcendent and divine. It’s about connection, about learning, pushing and investigating our bodies and ourselves. It’s the power that’s within us all, which is endlessly exciting.
“Sex and eroticism to me is magic, it has the ability to tap into the deepest, most base and primal parts of our psyche and also simulatenously connect us to something that sometimes feels almost transcendent and divine.”
Can you tell us more about your project Four Chambers, when it started, and where the name comes from?
The project started as a little experiment, we didn’t intend to do anything more than making some weird, hot videos with my friends for fun. We just put them up on Tumblr for free and the response was more than we could have imagined, I felt like the creative potential of porn as a medium for ideas just wasn’t really being explored and the audience was there so we went for it.
I named the Four Chambers project after the Anais Nin diaries called The Four Chambered Heart. I liked the word chamber because I can think of our films as different chambers in a house, where you walk through the corridors, opening doors into different scenes, where you get to enter and watch the action unfolding; transported for a few minutes into a new world and then moving on. It also references the physiology of a heart, the blood, the heartbeat, the pumping, the visceral feeling of being alive.
Did you start this project as a performer or directly as a director? How was your first experience in front/behind the camera?
It was always important for me to be on film right from the start, as well as behind the camera because only having a voyeuristic photographer’s gaze wasn't that interesting to me. There's still an inherent risk of putting your sexual self on film and I wouldn't ask or expect someone to do anything I wasn't prepared to do myself.
I hope that being a performer makes me a more understanding and thoughtful director?
“We wanted to keep the project and the films deliberately ambiguous to allow the viewer not to become trapped looking for what they already know they want to see, hopefully, that means they go into our films curious for new experiences. I am a woman who makes porn but I’m not just making “porn for women””
Is Four Chambers an erotic portal where female pornography has a more prominent spot?
As the head of the project and as a woman, my own perspective is always going to be pretty prominent, I can only make work from what I know. But with the project we’ve always tried to step away from catagorisations on the basis of type: gender, bodies, sexualities, type of sex etc. so much of porn nowadays is dominated by these labels that can be limiting. We wanted to keep the project and the films deliberately ambiguous to allow the viewer not to become trapped looking for what they already know they want to see, hopefully, that means they go into our films curious for new experiences. I am a woman who makes porn but I’m not just making “porn for women”
Pornography is usually a one-dimensional male-focused world; what is your opinion on what is out there right now?
I think the main issue with porn is that we don’t give it the same value as we would other creative media we create and consume; we have been sold the lie that it’s culturally worthless, vapid and indulgent and so we let it be defined by it’s imagined primary consumer, your basic straight white guy who is resistant to change and doesn’t want to challenge a cultural idea of sexual politics that serves him quite nicely. So that’s who the majority of porn is made for because that’s the majority of the people who fund it. It doesn’t have to be this way. I don’t buy into saying “all that kind of porn is bad” because it’s not, it totally works for some people.
The issue is when only one type of sex becomes the only thing you can find and therefore the only thing considered “normal”; sex is infinitely more complex and interesting than that. We need more creators with more perspectives, exploring sex from every angle.
“My artwork often centred and featured my own body as a site of visceral exploration, influenced by artists like Carolee Schneemann, Ana Mendieta, Helen Chadwick and Francesca Woodman who all used their physicality, their naked body and their sexuality as vehicles to create.”
For the same reason, do you still find it rare to find female pornography directors?
I think it’s interesting because actually female directors or makers of porn are quite common, certainly there are more women directing in mainstream porn than in Hollywood etc! Sex work has always been a place where women and people with diverse or subversive sexualities and gender expressions have always had some power because, at the end of the day, they are the ones that people were paying to see. This doesn’t mean it doesn’t still exist within the climate of the misogynist society we all know and that those sexual dynamics of creator and consumer aren’t infinitely complicated, but porn is more and more becoming decentralised from old, big business porn sites - so many creators have emerged doing everything themselves, it’s become much more personal and independently directed which is really exciting.
Pornography has long been snubbed by the mainstream art community, why do you think this is the case?
I think that art is too invested in being a luxury item to sell, which rich people spend unimaginable sums of money on — this means that it has to preserve itself as a cerebral commodity dealing with the highest forms of consciousness and understanding. It needs to be seen to be clever and exclusive to remain profitable. Sex is the opposite of cerebral - it’s bodily, it’s base, it doesn’t need education or social status. Anyone can and does fuck and the people that do - sex workers, porn performers are still thought of by polite society as disposable, as trash. I think the art world doesn’t want to get its hands too dirty, but it’s really missing out.
On your website, you try to stay clear of definitions of “art” and “pornography”, why is maintaining this sense of ambiguity important to you?
Yeah, I think there’s a tendency to break work about sex into “art” or “porn”, “worthy or unworthy”, “acceptable” or “unacceptable” - based on if we consider something to be in "good taste”, which for me, is kinda bullshit; tastes are subjective. If you think what I do is art, that’s fine, if you think that what I do is porn, that’s also fine. Deciding what category it fits into is so much less important than what it’s saying and how it makes you feel.
How important do you think it is for everyone to have their own sexual awakening and acceptance of their own desires and body pleasure?
Sex and pleasure are rooted in community building and bodily autonomy, ideas that challenge the capitalist ideal — that the endless spending of money on things is the path to happiness. Pleasure is an act of resistance.
Of the previous films that you have made, which is your favourite and why?
I find it too hard to pick one favourite, it’s like picking a favourite child; you can’t do it! I think I have a fetish for gelatinous, viscous liquids on the skin, so anything, where I can get weird, is the most fun to shoot— where we are fucking covered in lube or wine or gel or glitter.
I love the film we made last year called Orgone Theory because it’s the most ambitious, but also the most minute idea, a bunch of people fucking in a bespoke metal box in Berlin-based on the esoteric ideas of Wilhelm Reich’s Orgone Accumulators; everything about it came together perfectly at the very last second.
With technology constantly evolving, advancements in virtual reality and online streaming; where do you see the future of pornography going next?
The way that social media and the internet is going with hard censorship of sex we need a space away from big business and algorithms telling us what we can and can’t make. Porn is meant to be subversive, to push limits, challenge the status quo and expand our understanding of sex and ourselves. We need freedom from puritanical censorship and a return to community and exploration over profit.
Are there any movie/s, that have inspired your work during the years?
Too many to list - definitely the films of Claire Denis, especially Trouble Every Day and High Life, David Cronenberg’s Crash and Videodrome, The Witch and The Lighthouse by Robert Eggers.
I love anything with a creeping, oozing, dystopian sexuality. The intensity of Gaspar Noe films and the lighting in films by Wong Kar Wai. Also just music videos! A lot of the inspiration for making short films with quick, intense edits to build atmosphere, comes from the style of music videos.