ALEXANDRA GIBSON ARTIST STATEMENT:

My work is often described as timeless and being born of the surreal.  Both descriptions I find complimentary and to guide the natural inclination of my art, even when I am not deliberately pushing it in one direction or another. The first surrealist collection I did was "The Study of the Nocturnal Spirit" in 2004-2005, a collection of images where I set the camera to capture more than just a portrait or moment – but used the camera to capture what I believe to be the spirit of a person. More recently while studying under my master Mary Ellen Mark in Oaxaca, I shot a series of images at a festival rich with local masks and at a slaughterhouse. The slaughterhouse was a personal expedition for me - as my mother had just died less than a year earlier and I wanted to literally face death and mortality.

In regards to my erotica: I have always been fascinated by arts erotica. Not the silicone-enhanced, airbrushed, posed, mainstream image of erotica, but the raw uncensored fantasies of human love and lust glimpsed by chance in the dark.

Perhaps some of my desire to shoot erotica is driven by voyeuristic impulse? I do love beautiful things and who can resist a glimpse at the forbidden? But my fascination goes far beyond this. The erotic is not simply beauty, passion, and power; it is inextricably bound to fear, self-doubt and vulnerability. It is these dichotomies that excite me.

For my erotica series I seek to scratch the glossy veneer of fetish and sex photography to expose the humanity beneath the pose. I want to explore nudity as a concept of psychological exposure that does not necessarily depend upon actual sartorial armor.

I want to make your heart ache and your mouth water, to inhibit your senses. And above all things, I want to look with fresh eyes at the implications of a subject – sexuality – that is both the core of our existence and our most fiercely guarded and natural of instincts.

-Alexandra Gibson