I wasn’t sure what kind of piece I wanted to make when I first started searching for footage; I knew I wanted to do something with Christian iconography and fungi, due to the association both have with both life and death. I was surprised by the amount of color movies from the 60s and 70s that are public domain due to copyright non-renewal. Among these films is a good deal of “sexploitation” films- that is, movies that attempted to draw in audiences by including, essentially, softcore porn, regardless of their plots. What I was very surprised to stumble across is the sub-genre of “nunsploitation”- that is, horror movies that include scandalous, often lesbian and kinky, content involving nuns. Still, these movies are ostensibly horror, and are meant to scare or unnerve, while still selling sex/”beauty”- they walk the line of beauty and revulsion.
To me, my original two topics, christian iconography and fungi, are the same- I am pulled by the beauty of christian stained glass and architecture, but repulsed by the hatred and bigotry those structures so often house; I am entranced by the fungal bloom, but naturally repulsed by the reality and stench of decay. In Horror, Beauty, Revulsion I overlaid clips from these “nunsploitation” films with footage that others might more readily connect to the intersection of beauty and revulsion: rotting flowers, fungal growth, and wildfires.
