Curator Celeste Kamppila is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. She is best known for her music project under the name of Celeste X, formally known as Celeste XXX. Celeste blends together a bedroom pop sound with harsh distortion and siren-like melodies. Her unforgettable live performances bring to life a raw display of the feminine experience, transmuting emotions ranging from distress to sensuality. She draws inspiration from horror and sexuality which blend together to make an interesting psychodrama visual, using images of prehistoric goddess to 1980s VHS adult films. She uses many mediums that range from music, video, and performance art to SFX make-up.

Untitled - Tita Cicognani

Tita Cicognani (b. 1993, New York City) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her BFA at Otis College of Art and Design in 2017 and her MFA at Art Center College of Design in 2021. Her work has been included in such group exhibitions as Your Gaze Makes Me at Kylin Gallery, Los Angeles (2021); …And Elsewhere at Charles Long Projects, Pomona, CA (2021); and Smashing Into My Heart at The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2022). Solo exhibitions include Infinite Caca, presented at Leroy’s in Los Angeles (2022) and I Still Believe at the Hammer Museum (2022). www.titacicognani.love

Year:2023
Country:United States

Turtledove

Asexuality from the artist’s perspective.

Chantel Beam (they/them) is a photographer, cinematographer, and director based in Alameda, CA. Beam’s work is an homage to their love for the world of queer nightlife, which they navigate as a non-binary queer person, and explore this culture while showcasing the cool queers in their life. Chantel’s work features elements of grime but remains ethereal, with themes inspired by their childhood in classical dance training and John Waters films. Chantel’s work meshes the many worlds that inspire them, creating what can be described as the union of a dreamlike state and filthy camp–a vision of color and vulgarity.

Year:2021
Runtime:5:22
Country:United States
Director:Chantel Beam

Hentai and Crack Vol 1

A piece of video art with an accompanying artist-produced live score that explores the theatrics of being a camgirl in an unprecedented modern era. Production started during quarantine in March 2020: Nastya recorded the music using her Tesla’s DAW while scantily clad, and documented the process on her OnlyFans. She proposes a parasocial question to the viewer: “What is my secret life, and who am I really when the iPhone cameras are off?”

Nastya Valentine is a multidisciplinary artist, producer, and your new favorite cyber fantasy. Her work is often interdimensional, horny, and absurdist. In 2023, she will present Cyberhorny: a multimedia project and book, navigating the daily dystopia of living from an online sex work perspective and beyond. https://linktr.ee/nastyavalentine

Nastya Valentine is a multidisciplinary artist, producer, and your new favorite cyber fantasy. Her work is often interdimensional, horny, and absurdist. In 2023, she will present Cyberhorny: a multimedia project and book, navigating the daily dystopia of living from an online sex work perspective and beyond. https://linktr.ee/nastyavalentine

Year:2023
Runtime:14 minutes
Director:Nastya Valentine

The Magician

Created as part of a multimedia project from porn-star-turned-novelist Christopher Zeischegg and producer Luka Fisher, “The Magician” blurs the line between documentary and narrative, giving an intimate look into the creation of art, as well as diving deep into the mind of Zeischegg’s fictional alter ego. The novel is available via Amphetamine Sulphate.

Christopher Zeischegg is a writer, musician, and filmmaker who spent eight years working in the adult industry as performer Danny Wylde. He is the author of four books: The Magician, The Wolves that Live in Skin and Space, Body to Job, and Come to My Brother, and has contributed to Expat 4, Human Rights, Split Lips, and a variety of digital publications, such as Somesuch and The Nervous Breakdown.

Born and raised in Fort Smith, Arkansas, Matthew Kaundart is an LA-based writer/director and graduate of the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Focused on creating character-driven, nuance-rich stories for both film and television, Matthew’s been recognized as an IFP Episodic Lab Fellow and a finalist for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab.

Year:2016
Runtime:8 minutes
Country:United States
Director:Matthew Kaundart

Ricochet

A honeymoon in the desert turns sour when two lovers’ acid-dipped raspberries bring them on a trip from which there is no return.

Born the daughter of a female conservative Rabbi, Daviel Shy found her way to a lineage of experimental dyke art-makers. With an odd carnality that grew from an imagination equally steeped in the Hebrew bible and racy romance novels written by her aunt, she uses writing, performance, and film to release religious trauma and invite public and professional sexual healing.

Valerie Whitehawk is a Los Angeles-based experimental storyteller. She is currently working on an experimental non-fiction expanded media series called Love Hoarding that attempts to frame, demystify, honor, memorialize, and reframe the lived experiences of her maternal family members—survivors and descendants of the genocidal legacy of American Federal Indian Boarding Schools and the Urban Relocation Programs of the 1950s-1960s.

Year:2022
Runtime:4 minutes
Country:United States
Director:Daviel Shy & Valerie Whitehawk

Untitled - Peter Kalisch

Peter Kalisch (b. 1995, Escondido, CA) is a performance artist, curator, and noise musician based in Los Angeles. Kalisch received a BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2018. Apart from creating a variety of intense live performances, Kalisch is also the head curator of the event series Queerspace in Los Angeles. Kalisch has performed for Queer Biennial, the Broad Museum, the Getty Museum, Re:art show, as well as a variety of underground warehouse and nightlife venues.

Year:2023
Country:United States

Permanence is Only a Word

This work began as a poem in which Tange examined the idea of permanence, home and the perpetual limbo created by the lack of belonging. Additional vocals and translation by Chuck Hohng evolved into a video project shot and composed by Luka Fisher.

Kayla Tange is a Los Angeles-based artist born in South Korea and adopted by a Japanese-American family. Psychic boundaries, desire, and permanence are recurring themes in her work which pendulates between literal and absurdly satirical while exploring ways of utilizing collaboration to convey feelings of longing, belonging, and transforming stories of shame into a symbolic and valuable medium. www.kaylatange.com / IG: @kayla.tange

Born in Long Beach, CA, and raised in Seoul, South Korea, Chuck Hohng has always lived in the gray area. Not fully Korean nor an American, his attempt to understand the cultural duality of life has led him to seek a way to connect different cultures through the visual medium. www.chuckhohng.net / @chohng

Luka Fisher is a gender queer transfeminine artist and cultural producer. Her visual art and photographs have been exhibited at the Bowers Museum, The Box, Last Projects, and at the Queer Biennial, and her video productions have screened at Outfest, SF Transgender Film Festival, Translations, and the American Documentary Film Festival. She is currently producing The Lovers, a queer web series by Daviel Shy that explores intimacy amongst a group of friends during the pandemic. http://www.luka-fisher.com

Year:2020
Runtime:4 minutes
Country:United States
Director:Kayla Tange, Chuck Hohng, Luka Fisher

Mz Neon

A short documentary profiling the journey-so-far of musician and multimedia artist Mz Neon, following her creative evolution, philosophy, and journey-so-far as a transgender woman navigating and advocating for herself and her community in the arts and entertainment industry.

Mz Neon is a genre-bending musician and multimedia artist residing in Los Angeles by way of NYC. She is actively touring and releasing music while cultivating an ever-evolving mixed media, art, and advocacy platform. A biracial trans woman with a punk pedigree, Mz Neon unpacks issues of gender, sexuality, spirituality, and philosophy with a provocative glamor that stares down the blond bombshell archetype, then dropkicks it.

FOLLOWED WITH A LIVE PERFORMANCE BY MZ NEON:

“Sonic Invocations: Post Gender & Genre Acceleration”

A musical performance medley by Mz Neon, synthesizing iconoclastic anti-heroine archetypes with post-narrative storytelling through the discordian lens of alchemical self-actualization vs. exploitation and ethical nihilism of outsider-insider radical assimilation.