Short Bio

I was born in Udine, Italy but moved to London, England when I was five. I have also lived in Johannesburg, Ottawa, Paris, Sao Paolo, Edinburgh and New York. I am quite at home wherever.

Statement

Gestation, Birth, Death & Recreation:
I aim to portray Power vs Force in human relations. Force is fleeting and propulsive, whilst power is constant. Power is equivalent to drive whilst force directly relates to desire. Drive swallows desire, but desire cannot be digested. The phallus is a symbol of power, embodied by a number of surrogates: an erect penis, a cigar, a tall building, a tree, a ferocious animal, a person in an authoritative position or any thing or being which encourages/curbs/regulates the desire/enjoyment of the O/other. The O/other might be God, the monarch, the media, the headmistress, the neighbours—any placeholder that regulates our enjoyment that links us to power, embodied in the phallus. 

The phallus is the signifier of power while a penis is a signifier for the male gender; the former sometimes encapsulates the latter. The phallus is akin to drive while a penis is akin to desire. When they are brought together, the union is sublime, and what results is absolute but finite power and force. When they are separate, it becomes clear that anyone—women in particular—can have the phallus even though we do not have penises, or that a man can have a penis, but no phallus or power. 

I consistently portray the split between the two; the locus around which the phallus reaches its apogee and when it finally looses its power to become (again) a mere object. My erotic horror film "Blessed Sacrilege: White Funeral" illustrates this plainly. The hyperlink is found at the bottom of this page.

I hope that you enjoy what you view. Please drop me a line with your observations, comments or questions. 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Biography

Nora Geist is the youngest child of a British legate who became used to moving house frequently at an early age. She graduated from the H-Farm International school in Treviso, Italy where she defiantly came out as lesbian at the age of 16. She received her first camera as a gift at the age of 17, and she began taking snapshots of friends and family, who sat for creative portraits and tableaux. After earning her first degree in psychology from the University of Paris 8, Nora enrolled in the Associazione Italiana di Psicoanalisi qualify as a psychoanalyst. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in psychoanalysis from the New School for Social Research in New York, where she practiced for ten years.

At university Nora encountered the work of Robert Mapplethorpe and was immediately and simultaneously shocked and captivated by his vision and the daring compositions of his sets. Not long after, she came across the work of Jan Saudek and became inspired to begin expressing her passion for psychoanalyical object relations through erotic art, working in a medium that continues to nourish her. Through erotic photography, Nora critiques societal views of race, religion, class and sexuality in stark and sometimes satirical and controversial works. 

The people immortalised in Nora's photographs come from a mixture of backgrounds but most of them are her friends and friends of. Her studio is a safe space for them to check their identities at the door and assume wildly different and anonymous personnae. Although each shoot is thematically staged, she encourages them to abandon their inhibitions, engage their sexual fantasies and maximise their enjoyment of each others' bodies. This allows a great deal of freedom within each shoot as well as a degree of unpredictability.

Since 2007, Nora has focused primarily on architecture and nature to articulate her subject matter of object relations. She tends to follow her intuition as to how a picture of a place or object will turn out: it will be a Space if she gets a sense of welcoming, creativity and change. It will be an Edge if she gets a sense of restriction, resistance or limitation. This is Power vs. Force again, but she asserts that they exist in dialectic and it is possible for there to be flow from one to the other. Nora also holds that it is possible to create a space where none previously existed: a creatio ex nihilo perhaps. 

Nora's psychoanalytical career has taken her to work in New York, Edinburgh, London and Dublin. She is married to Alessandra and they have two grown children.
 

Resume / CV

OK Harris Gallery 1997

The Alternative Museum 1999

Exit Art  2001

Piccadilly Gallery 2004

Seattle Erotic Art Show  2010 

ARTundressed 2017 

Rochester (New York, USA) Erotic Art Festival  2018

Erotic & Bizarre Art Film Festival  2018

Tag! Queer Shorts Festival  2019

The Lift-Off Sessions  2019

BIDEODROMO  2019

Planet 9 Film & Art Festival

Kino London Film Festival  2020

Triple SSS (Sensual, Sexual, Smut Erotic Art Exhibit)  2020 

Motion for Pictures  2020

New Dreams International Film Festival  2020

Gorst Underground!  2020

6ix Screams International Film Festival 2020 (Best Experimental)

AltFF Alternative Film Festival 2020

Couch Film Festival 2020

Roxie Roz Burlesque  2021

OGA (S)EXHIBITIONS 2020/2021 

New York Nil Gallery 2021

Strandlines LGBTQ+ History Month—February 2021 (www.strandlines.london )

Filmoptico International Art Visual and Film Festival 2021

Gravedigger Dave's Anthology Festival 2021

Caligari. Festival Internacional de Cine de Terror 2021

Hyperlink to "The Blessed Sacrilege: White Funeral" (NSFW):
https://filmfreeway.com/theblessedsacrilege