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Media Contact: Camilla Lombard
Events and Publicity Manager
(415) 974-8985 ext.201
camillal@goodvibes.com

'OUR LADY OF THE BURNING DREAMS' ART OPENING FEATURES
NOTED COLLAGIST PENNY SLINGER, PLUS WORK BY CAROL QUEEN AND BOBBY MORGAN

Pioneering Adult Retailer’s Art Gallery Hosts a New Collection of Esteemed Erotic Artists

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San Francisco, CA -- (April 1, 2010): Good Vibrations is pleased to invite the public for the opening reception of its most recent Polk Street Gallery show, Our Lady of the Burning Dreams. Hosted by Annie Sprinkle and showcasing three very different collage artists whose work playfully and/or reverently embraces the sacred, the sexual, and the surreal -- Penny Slinger, Carol Queen, and Bobby Morgan -- this show features each artist's preoccupation with color, form, Goddess consciousness and other spiritual tropes, and variegated erotic elements. Enjoy refreshments and meet the artists at the Polk Street Gallery, in back of the Good Vibrations store at 1620 Polk St. in San Francisco, on Thursday, April 8, 2010, from 6 to 8 pm.

Good Vibrations is honored to show a sample of Penny Slinger's collages in one of the first West Coast shows of this masterful work of evocative collage. One of the world's top visionary erotic artists, Penny emerged on the British art scene in the sixties, challenging the existing status quo and playing a key role in opening the art world to female sexuality and the larger sexual revolution. A few weeks after her college graduation in 1969, Penny Slinger’s erotic, expressive, and controversial artwork was being exhibited at The Institute of Contemporary Art in London. 

The early seventies saw Penny emerge as one of Europe’s foremost erotic surrealists. The late seventies saw her blossom into a full-fledged Tantric artist.  Slinger felt that her work as a Surrealist brought the subconscious into the light of consciousness, while Tantra brought super-consciousness into the conscious realm. Her bestselling book Sexual Secrets (co-written with Nik Douglas) was published in 1979. The map of her journey to date, spanning half a century, establishes her as a major innovator in the creative arts as well as a leading light of the emergent Goddess consciousness. For the last fifteen years she has been living at the Goddess Temple, a sanctuary with multi-media studios in the Santa Cruz Mountains. 

Penny Slinger's collages received their West Coast premiere show at the Center for Sex & Culture in July of 2006; at the request of Annie Sprinkle, they decorated the gallery room where she and her partner Elizabeth Stephens held their Orange Wedding. (Dr. Sprinkle will host the Polk Street Gallery opening of this show on April 8th.) Since that time Penny's surreal work has been included in two prominent exhibitions in England: one, "Angels of Anarchy," was a major retrospective on female Surrealism which also included artists like Frieda Kahlo, Leonora Fini, and Leonora Carrington held at Manchester City Art Gallery; her work was also featured in a major exhibit at the Tate Gallery, St. Ives, called "The Dark Monarch: Magic and  Modernity in British Art." 

See pennyslinger.com for more detail and representative images. Her work, including books and videos available for purchase, is also found at GoddessChannel.com and BlueLotustemple.com. 

"I am so honored and excited to be able to show art next to Penny Slinger's," says Good Vibrations staff sexologist, author and collage artist Carol Queen. "Penny's work and life link the changes in sexual culture of the 1960s with the present and future of sexual possibility and consciousness change. Her collage work is very important and very, very beautiful." 

Queen's own collage artwork was instigated by her intuitive attraction to Goddess spirituality and by Good Vibrations, which in 1993 published the book Femalia, edited by Good Vibes founder Joani Blank. The book launch included "TheVulvArt Show," images made from the vulva photos from the book, and the goddess collage Carol made for the show was the first of many. "Besides my original 'virgin/vulva' trope, I've extended into images that celebrate and play with spiritual/religious power, gender, sexuality, porn, and other themes and personages holding cultural power and resonance. Sometimes my partner Bobby Morgan collages with me -- it's such a fascinating dance to do art with another person in a medium that so calls on the subconscious and the non-linear. Besides the power of the images, the other element that is very important to me continues to be color, the very thing that first drew me to the brilliant Marys, Jesuses, and saints of Catholic images I saw as a kid. I'm completely self-taught, and am drawn to images for reasons I don't always fully understand and that are rarely didactic or entirely planned."

In addition to her almost 20 years at Good Vibrations, Carol Queen is a widely-published author of sex information, commentary, and erotica. Among her books are the award-winning PoMoSexuals and The Leather Daddy and the Femme, plus Exhibitionism for the Shy (just re-released, including new interviews and material) and Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture. She has a Ph.D. in sexology, works at Good Vibrations, and is the founding director of the Center for Sex & Culture (sexandculture.org), which she created with her partner Robert Morgan Lawrence. 

Bobby Morgan began working on some of the cut-paper collages with Carol, but after he became disabled and frequently bedridden, he learned PhotoShop so he could make art digitally. Using photos he and Carol take, pictures of friends, and found materials he scans or gleans from the Web, his collage work is full of sexy, surreal images, architectural and cosmic backdrops, occasional hints from his scientific background, and playful visual comments. Whenever he is unable to travel with Carol, she looks for images to photograph and send him from her iPhone, looking forward to the art he will create with them before she even returns home. 

"I form the two-dimensional into perspectives and relationship with personal statements of politics and sex," Morgan says. "I work with meshed overlapped edges, with illusory depth adding familiar chaos to the known. As a chronic pain patient I work from bed when I am able. My medications and pain mediate both my physical and mental states in a near-hallucinatory manner. I hurt a lot, but when I can I work on these, it helps." 

Queen and Morgan's paper-and-paste collage has been exhibited at Femina Potens Gallery, The Sex Workers' Art Shows in Olympia and San Francisco, and at CityArts. This is Morgan's first public show of his PhotoShop works. Some works will be available for purchase, and Queen and Morgan may be available for commissioned work. 

About Good Vibrations
Good Vibrations is the San Francisco-based retailer trusted for more than three decades to provide a comfortable, safe environment for finding sex-positive products and educational materials to enhance one's sex life. Good Vibrations offers products through its website (goodvibes.com) and retail stores.

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