After you're done
Jo Broughton and Sarah Sudhoff
After you’re done, comprising works by Sarah Sudhoff and Jo Broughton, is an exhibition curated by Macushla Robinson and Andrea Klabanova which peeks behind-the-scenes at the sets, props, and devices of the sex industry.
Sudhoff’s Wired series depicts an archive of arousal. Devoid of human bodies, these photographs of devices from the Kinsey Institute (Indiana University) sit at the intersection of research and play. While some of these devices are used in scientific research into human sexuality and do not exist in the porn industry, many of them might also find a home in our most intimate spaces. Their meaning changes according to the context in which we find them: a dildo reads very differently when left behind on a porn set, than when photographed within a sexual research institute.
Broughton’s photographs of vacant porn sets were taken while she worked as a cleaner at a porn studio. Shot in the aftermath of frenetic energy, these abandoned scenes are historical documents that refrain from moral judgement. They are funny, theatrical, and yet tinged with melancholy.
Shifting the focus from the body to the sites and objects associated with mediated sexuality, these artists play with the tensions between technology, sensation, and emotion. On a material basis, both sexual devices and porn sets are prosthetics that elicit bodily sensations. Yet the material cultures of sex play a central role in our psychological states, fantasies, and sexual identities. After you’re done explores our relationship to pleasure in two distinct contexts.