Vintage erotica and voyeurism are on display in I’m So Wild About Your Strawberry Mouth, an exhibition of multidisciplinary works from acclaimed West Virginia-born, New York-based artist Aïda Ruilova in her West Coast debut at LA’s Kayne Griffin Corcoran Gallery. From the pages of the intense Werner Herzog-associated actor Klaus Kinski’s notoriously fictionalized autobiography, the exhibition’s title acts as visceral kindling to Ruilova’s themes of self-caricature, desire, intoxication and escape. Posters advertizing the classic 1970s French erotica film series Emmanuelle and the soft-focus fantasy knock-offs it inspired are inscribed with black paint from which leer cartoon eyes. The images’ allure lies in their “exploitation of the figure to propagate the identity of the franchise film,” explains Ruilova, whose works have shown in the Venice and Whitney Biennales. The pools of black are her way of “adding another narrative that is like a void.” Also on view is a 45-minute video work in which celebrated grindhouse director Abel Ferrara discusses how he would direct his own death scene in relation to that of the late Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italian radical and gruesomely murdered director of incendiary 1975 film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. 

I’m So Wild About Your Strawberry Mouth runs from today March 23 through May 4 at the Kayne Griffin Corcoran Gallery, Santa Monica.