ART

I’m interested in the private life and thoughts underneath the respectable one.

Desire, ageing, attraction, shame, fantasy, vulnerability, sex, control, jealousy, tenderness, hope, difference, ugliness, humour and all the things perfectly ordinary people carry around while presenting a much tidier version of themselves to the world.

I inevitably explore these things from where I stand myself: a middle-aged white man watching his own body age while noticing that curiosity, desire and imagination do not necessarily age at the same speed.

There is a disconnect there. A rift.

And I know I’m not alone in it.

So much remains unspoken, yet sits quietly in the darker corners of our minds every single day.

That contradiction fascinates me.

The shell changes. Sometimes dramatically. But what happens to the person inside it? What happens to attraction? To sexuality? To fantasy? To the things we still want but increasingly feel we are not supposed to want?

A lot of my work begins with that slightly uncomfortable “yuck” reaction.

And honestly, I consider that a good thing.

I tend to follow it like a dog following a scent. Towards the uncomfortable thought, the socially inconvenient desire, the fantasy somebody immediately wants to hide, dismiss or condemn.

Too old.

Too young.

Too sexual.

Too crude.

Too intimate.

Too ugly.

Too much.

Instead of immediately looking away, I usually want to know why.

Sometimes discomfort is warning us about something important.

Sometimes we have simply reached one of those invisible cultural borders that generations before us decided should exist, and nobody has bothered asking why for a very long time.

I don’t have much respect for a boundary simply because it is old.

That doesn’t mean I make images purely to shock. Shock for its own sake becomes boring very quickly.

I’m much more interested in contradiction.

Beauty and decay.

Youth and age.

Strength and vulnerability.

Control and surrender.

Tenderness and vulgarity.

The ordinary and the explicit.

What we show and what we think.

Sometimes that requires a face or a glance.

Sometimes an old hand resting on young skin.

Sometimes nudity.

Sometimes sex.

I don’t see those as separate artistic worlds.

The human body is simply another language, and sexuality is one of the oldest and most powerful things human beings have spent centuries simultaneously celebrating, hiding, regulating, fantasising about and pretending not to think about.

I explore many of the same questions through film.

I’m fascinated by what happens when genres that are supposedly meant to remain separate begin bleeding into each other.

Short film and adult film.

Drama and pornography.

Fantasy and realism.

Fine art and vulgarity.

Something beautifully cinematic suddenly becoming explicit.

Something explicit refusing to stop being human.

A fantasy can exist privately in somebody’s head for decades without ever being spoken aloud. Film gives me the possibility of letting that fantasy breathe, move, develop characters and eventually become physically real on screen.

That interests me far more than simply reproducing the visual language of conventional pornography.

Why must a believable short film cut away the moment sex becomes real?

Why must explicit sex suddenly abandon character, emotion and story?

Why are we so comfortable with simulated violence, death, hatred and cruelty, yet still become deeply uncomfortable when the camera refuses to leave the room during one of the most ordinary human acts?

Those borders interest me.

And I enjoy crossing them.

I’m also fairly unimpressed by a lot of the world we have built around ourselves.

There is an extraordinary amount of performance in modern life.

How to look.

How to behave.

What opinions to have.

What morality to display.

Who to impress.

How to impress them.

What kind of body to present.

What desires are acceptable.

What thoughts are safe to admit.

What must be hidden.

We build identities for colleagues, friends, partners, strangers and increasingly for audiences online, then spend enormous amounts of energy maintaining them.

Everyone becomes their own little public-relations department.

I find that exhausting.

And often incredibly shallow.

Much of my work is therefore interested in the moments where that polished surface cracks.

The second somebody forgets the pose.

The thought they probably shouldn’t admit.

The desire that doesn’t match the identity they present.

The attraction that feels socially inconvenient.

The body that refuses to remain young.

The emotion that isn’t pretty.

The fantasy that makes somebody immediately say, “No. That’s disgusting.”

Those are often precisely the places where I become curious.

I push boundaries because boundaries tell me where people become emotionally invested.

Sometimes that makes the work unpopular.

Sometimes hated.

Sometimes loved.

Sometimes people laugh.

Sometimes they recoil.

Sometimes they stare far longer than they expected to.

All of those reactions interest me.

I don’t particularly need everybody to like what I make, and I have very little interest in sanding ideas down until nobody can possibly be offended by them.

If everyone immediately agrees that an image is tasteful, appropriate and beautiful, I sometimes wonder whether I have actually discovered anything at all.

A photograph does not end with the people inside the frame.

The person looking at it brings their own history, morality, attraction, prejudice, curiosity, shame and discomfort into the work.

Two people can look at exactly the same image and see completely different things.

One sees beauty.

Another sees obscenity.

One sees exploitation.

Another sees freedom.

One sees humour.

Another sees something they desperately wish they had never looked at.

That gap interests me enormously.

Sometimes I’m not even sure the real subject of the photograph is the person in it.

It may be the person standing in front of it.

I remain deliberately private and work under the name Loke Utgard.

I don’t particularly want the person behind the camera to become the subject.

The work is enough.

And perhaps one warning is appropriate.

I’m probably not for the faint-hearted.