Femina Potens

Art of Restraint feat. Lorelei Lee, Fivestar, & surprise celebrity guest

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: Malia Schlaefer, feminapotenspress@gmail.com

GIVE INTO YOUR DEEPEST DESIRES AND INDULGE IN EROTIC DECADENCE AT FEMINA POTENS ART GALLERY ‘ART OF RESTRAINT’

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA - MAY 16, 2009 - 8PM. Last February Femina Potens hosted a sold-out evening of erotic debauchery at the first ever ‘Art of Restraint’ bondage art Salon.  On May 16th 2009 the doors of Femina Potens Art Gallery will open at 7:30pm once again. This time you will have your ticket in hand, rather than just watching all the excited patrons line up and patiently wait as they are escorted on the red carpet into a night of true decadence and erotic debauchery. You will be one of those happy attendees watching as bodies are manipulated into erotic bondage art installations and beautiful bound submissives offer you champagne, sweet strawberries and dark chocolates, listening to the music from one of San Franciso’s hottest DJs.  In our small intimate setting you are not only witnessing the bondage art that they are creating, but you are a part of it. You are standing side by side with celebrity bondage artists, models, and porn stars.

Step inside and experience rope cinching tight into eager flesh as bodies struggle and dance in the air in an erotic ballet of dominance and submission. Be present as we explore together the Freedom through Bondage. Witness our brave and unyielding artists as they ask themselves and their viewers “how we can find freedom for our spirits to soar when our bodies are given over fully to the restraints of bondage?  And what holds us in place when nothing but our Master or Mistresses’ voice has wrapped us in bonds? Some of the most skilled rope artists and bondage experts in the country have gathered in this close gallery setting to meld art and bondage to intertwine submission and empowerment in a dynamic exchange between two people and an audience starving for connection.   Doors will be locked at 8pm sharp, placing you in the center of a hot avant-garde bondage scene.  Welcome to the second edition of Art of Restraint.

This May’s Art of Restraint will feature rope artists Lew Rubens, Lochai, James Mogul, and Fivestar. Award winning suspension model and Indie Porn Pioneer of the year, Madison Young, as seen on MTV, Independent Film Channel and Curve Magazine.  The sexy and smart AVN nominated Lorelei Lee will be bound for your ultimate pleasure. Raina Degrey, Christina Horn and Mo will be our dedicated service submissives, constantly pleasing us with sweet treats, sparkling beverages and boot blacking. Erotic Performance Art by Sadie Lune. We are delighted to be joined by a special Celebrity Guest who was born and raised here in San Francisco, and is now a famous comedienne. Visual art installations by Tom Cat of Kink.com, a Steam Punk Powered  Vibrator installation, and  an antique collection of vibrators brought to you by the Center for Sex and Culture. Live drawings by Suzanne Forbes. Through rope bondage and erotic performance the performers will be delving into an exploration of how physical and mental restraint creates freedom.  Our performers will utilize rope, metal, flesh, and other articles of choice that play with the juxtaposition of freedom and restraint indulgence and self-control.

Lights out at 11pm sharp…unless you are fortunate enough to be a Femina Potens Member.  Members of Femina Potens will be invited to stay for after hours with the artists and models.  To become a member go to the Donate button on www.feminapotens.org and follow the prompts.  All levels of membership will get you into this sexy after hours event. This will be an evening of decadence and erotic debauchery.  Champagne, strawberries, chocolate, beautiful women, shibari, restraint, and groundbreaking art. Come be a part of what the SF Gate called “The Most Happening Art Space in San Francisco”.

‘Art of Restraint Erotic Rope Bondage Art Salon

Femina Potens Art Gallery

2199 Market St @ Sanchez

May 16, 2009 @ 8:00 - 11:00 pm

Doors open at 7:30pm

Doors locked at 8:00pm sharp -  no ins and outs

$100.00 per ticket

$75 for Members - Sign up to become a member today

For more information please visit www.feminapotens.org

This event will sell out.  Advanced online ticket purchase is highly recommended through Brown Paper Ticketing: https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/57876

See the video from the first ‘Art of Restraint’ by clicking here.

Become a Femina Potens Member today and help sustain community arts!  You will receive tons of membership perks including free SIZZLE tickets.   JOIN NOW!

On Facebook? RSVP here: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/event.php?eid=76357108130&ref=nf

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Madison Young , your kinky girl next door, is making waves in feminism one orgasm at a time with her award winning queer production company Madison Young Productions (www.madisonbound.com) and her award winning nationally recognized art gallery and performance space Femina Potens (www.feminapotens.org).  Femina Potens is a sex positive art gallery and performance space dedicated to women and transgendered artists.  Madison the world with her sex positive performances, workshops, panels, art work and readings from her upcoming memoir “The Tail of a Bondage Model”.  Madison ‘s writings have been published in On Our Backs and Girlfriends Magazine and can also be found in the anthology “Baby Remember My Name”.   Madison has been featured on MTV’s LOGO channel program Out and About, the documentary Lesbian Sex and Sexuality Porn Today: Pushing the Limits, and was featured in Brian Alexander’s recent book release “America Unzipped”.

James Mogul created the bondage photography web site NawaShibari.com and is the director of Kink.com’s MenInPain.com and theTrainingOfO.com sites. He is an amazing rigger and top, a captivating instructor and a serious photographer. James launched his kinky career in Seattle, where he played, taught and developed content for NawaShibari.com. James conceived of and produced the groundbreaking Artbound I and II events in 2000.

Experienced rigger and suspension artist, Lew Rubens has a love and passion of bondage that shows in his work. Known mostly for his wild suspensions, Lew joined the public side of BDSM play spring of 2001 and started his website, BoundNDetermined.com.   A few years later Kink.com made him an offer he couldnt resist and he began running Waterbondage for them from winter 2006, through spring 2008.  At that time moving into a “Bondage Consultant” position for the prestigous company. On his own again now, Lew has plans to revive Boundndetermined.com and well as starting excitingf new sites LewRubens.com and Lewbari.com. as well as contracting his Bondage Consulting knowledge abroad. Lew has presented his workshops and demos of his unique style at many BDSM and bondage industry events throughout the US, Canada, Jamaica and Germany.

Although he’s been part of the public kink scene for thirteen years, Lochai has been exploring kink and fetish since he was a six year old riding the school bus when he tied up his first “girlfriend”. Since those humble beginnings, Lochai has built up an impressive resume not only as an award winning photographer, but also as a renowned bondage rigger, educator, and stalwart of the greater BDSM CommUNITY. It’s no surprise that in August of 2008, he was picked by kink.com, one of the most respected companies in the adult entertainment industry, to spearhead their flagship site, hogtied.com. Lochai’s iconic photo, “Beach Bound,” had the distinction of being judged “The World’s Most Erotic Photograph” by Erotic Signature. “Beach Bound” also has the distinction to be in the permanent collection of The Leather Archives in Chicago as well as in the World Erotic Art Museum in Miami. His work has been published in such publications as British Journal of Photography, World’s Greatest Erotic Art of Today Vol. I & II, Secret, Skin Two, Bizarre, Prometheus, Cherry, A Magazine, Fetish Anthology, and Extreme Anthology as well as his own fine art photography books. He brings the same flair and energy to his rope work, whether he’s performing or teaching erotic rope, photography and bdsm lifestyle classes at any number of national kink events. As an educator and organizer, Lochai is fiercely dedicated to his CommUNITY. He helps monitor and organize online communication platforms such as the AlternativePresenters.com, which he created, and freely shares his skills and knowledge to rope enthusiasts and photographers of all experience levels and from all walks of life. You can view his photography at http://www.kirinawa.com

Lorelei Lee is a student, writer, and porn performer. She has appeared in over 200 BDSM, queer, and mainstream adult films.  Her fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Transfer, $pread Magazine, Animal Shelter, and Denver Quarterly.  She has been nominated for three AVN awards and has received both a National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts YoungARTS scholarship and the Bishop Award for Best Tit-Tortured Model 2005.  She has toured nationally with the Sex Workers’ Art Show, and has been featured in such performance festivals and reading series as the National Queer Arts Festival, LitQuake, Femina Potens’ SIZZLE, and the Bay Area Poetry Marathon.

Rain Degrey is a fetish/bondage model, artist, and writer. She has appeared in a number of books and magazines, including Charles Gatewood’s “Messy Girls” and “Photography For perverts”. In her film and performance work she has shot for Kink.com and Twisted Factory, as well as performing for the SF fetish ball. Always inspired by rope and pretty girls, she is currently being mentored to become a rope Top.

Always a literalist, Dusty Horn has taken the act of making a name for herself to absurd lengths. As a porn performer and practitioner of professional BDSM for over two years, she goes by Christina Mabry Horn, and you can call her Tina if you’re lucky. Vast legions of bike punks and DIY rockers know her by a monosyllabic moniker referencing her resemblance to a 14-year-old English schoolboy. As for what they call her when she’s at home, only her attorney knows for sure. Horn earned her BA in modern literature from UCSC and King’s College London which may go some way towards explaining the Marxist-feminist-paraliterary critical theory slant, and also the body hair. Among her accomplishments are writing for Mcsweeney’s the Believer, penning, publishing, and distributing her nominal sex worker memoir zine, releasing her former band’s 7inch on her own label, booking three punk tours, and getting DP’d alongside a who’s-who cast and crew of erotic artists and activists in her very first porno, Layover. Her double life as a social worker and volunteer for a variety of non-profits and art galleries keeps her honest. She is a show business impresario, an urban cowboy cyclist, a part-time hippie, a loud fast and loose drummer, and a face-melting wah rhythmn guitarist. A hopeless rambler, Horn currently sets up shop in the San Francisco East Bay and cannot begin to tell you how badly she could use a spanking right about now.

Sadie Lune is a pleasure activist, bizarre and erotic absurdist, and multi-media artist based in San Francisco, whose work focuses on sexuality and gender in performance and visual genres. Sadie has been a sex worker of varied specialty for ten years and has presented and facilitated sex-positive workshops for the past seven years. She has volunteered at the Center for Sex and Culture and the St. James Infirmary (an occupational health and safety clinic for sex workers and their partners) and worked with SWOP-USA. Sadie is also the co-creator of Paul Reubens’ Day, an annual celebration of sexual expression and Pee-wee Herman, the fifth anniversary of which she hosted in 2007: www.paulreubensday.com . She has appeared in queer porn for web and DVD and as a guest on Nina Hartley’s weekly web sex show. Sadie often performs in plays as either a souped-up femme fatale, tough butch, or harried old hag. She also enjoys performance art, and has shown her talents and her cervix across the U.S. and in parts of Europe. Sadie was quite honored to perform in Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Steven’s Green Wedding. Offstage, Sadie works on fetish modeling (Women in Control, The Mammoth Book of Erotic Women), writing and drawing comics (Fancy Whore and Saturn Returns Komyx in $pread Magazine), and visual art, some of the later of which is featured in the BDSM documentary ‘Vice and Consent’. Her short film Yum, won the People’s Choice Award in the 2007 Good Vibrations Amateur Erotic Film Competition. Sadie is a recent convert to blogging; she writes for the comic blog BreakUp Girl as well as her own three (!) blogs: Sadie Wants a Wife, Whores in the Woods, and Working Hearts. Sadie is beginning work on editing an anthology of essays by personal partners of sex workers. She is currently smack dab in her Saturn Returns which pretty much explains everything. Sadie lives in the Mission District of San Francisco with her three snakes (and beloved roommate Irene).

Suzanne Rachel Forbes was born and raised in Manhattan, and educated as an artist, starting with private lessons, from the age of 8. She began classes at the Art Student’s league at ten and continued her studies there as a teenager after dropping out of Stuyvesant High School on the advice of her guidance counselor. After getting her GED she attended Parsons School of Design for two years and then finished her BFA at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, in the Fine Art Program.  Straight out of art school she went to work as a courtroom artist for CBS Television, CNN and several newspapers, as a book illustrator and portraitist, and then as the regular artist on DC Comics’ Star Trek, The Original Series for a year and a half.  After a creative burnout and art hiatus of ten years she returned to drawing and painting in 2005.  Her current work focuses on traditional portraiture with an alternative flavor, as well as allegories and narrative portraits. Her paintings, comic art and courtroom illustrations are in collections across the United States.  She lives in Berkeley with a large manatee-like cat.

Boi mo is a giggly little bottom who blushes easily and melts over fierce femmes and hot daddies. He loves to feed you strawberries and lick your boots, and is even more thrilled if he gets to serve you while he’s bound in rough rope.

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Femina Potens is a nationally recognized art gallery and performance space dedicated to the advancement of women and transgendered artists since 2001.

Sponsored by the Queer Cultural Center with support from California Arts Council, San Francisco Arts Commission, the Zellerbach Foundation and Grants for the Arts.  Femina Potens is a leading queer organization in San Francisco, and has been featured on the LOGO channel, Q-Television, Bitch, Bust, Spread, Brian Alexander’s book “America Unzipped”, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and the San Francisco Chronicle where Violet Blue called Femina Potens, “the most happening art space in the city; a revolution in art and sex.”