Erotica Without Borders

There is a story behind every piece in Paula Sussman’s A Neurotic Erotic Alphabet — a funny, quirky, off-the-wall story — and she’ll share many of them at tonight’s free artist talk about the photography exhibit. The triptych “Sexy Sadie and Simian Sam Are Switchable Sweethearts,” for example, features as...

By Amber Taufen

April 11, 2013

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There is a story behind every piece in Paula Sussman’s A Neurotic Erotic Alphabet — a funny, quirky, off-the-wall story — and she’ll share many of them at tonight’s free artist talk about the photography exhibit. The triptych “Sexy Sadie and Simian Sam Are Switchable Sweethearts,” for example, features as its main subjects a half-nude woman and a gorilla, and “when I took this, I had a friend who had one of these giant gorillas in their yard,” Sussman remembers. She asked to borrow the yard ornament, but it wouldn’t fit through the front door of her apartment. So the gorilla stood in the hallway until a friend helped Sussman take the front door off her apartment so that they could get the figure inside, where it stayed for weeks.

Every image in the exhibit — with a piece for every letter of the alphabet — is at least somewhat sexual and, in Sussman’s words, “totally off the wall.” Some are outtakes, some are older pieces renamed to fit the theme. And none of them involve computers: Every photograph was taken with a medium format film camera, without the help of digital manipulation.

Sussman will speak at 7 p.m. at the Dairy Center for the Arts, 2590 Walnut Street in Boulder; the exhibit is on display through April 19. For more information, call 303-440-7826 or visit www.thedairy.org.
March 8-April 19, 2013

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Amber Taufen has been writing about people, places and things in Denver since 2005. She works as an editor, writer, and production and process guru out of her home office in the foothills.

Contact: Amber Taufen

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