Conversations with coner - self portrait

UNWORTHY

”I’ve been wanting to explore religion for a while….”

Things we do here are earth make us not worthy of going to heaven. There is a sense of failure, we’re not not good enough, we are guilty of committing all these sins while we’re here.

The radiant circle in the background represents a halo often seen in Byzantine paintings depicting a christ figure or angel.

An unworthy angel

~ Coner, August 2020

My shadow loves kink

“The brighter the light, the darker the shadow.” – Carl Jung

For those of us turned on by kink, we know just how dark our shadow can be. To be raped, tied up, choked with cum, mummified and electrocuted all in the name of orgasm might seem perverted and weird to some, but it’s when we embrace our fleshly desires the deepest satisfaction occurs.

All of us have a shadow. 

Even if we save the world, never lie, cheat, covet, envy, if we give money to the homeless and feed the poor, we all have a dark side, a shadow. The shadow is the part of our unconscious mind made up of everything we’ve tried to repress throughout our lives: feelings, impulses, desires, perversions, wild taboo thoughts. This starts when we are young; we learn some thoughts are best kept to ourselves for fear of being ostracized. Our conscious selves are groomed to believe we should what we’ve been taught- a stable career, 2.5 kids with white picket fence, happy marriage, blah blah. Yet, for those of us who are here dancing with Coner’s shadow, our unconscious wants more - domination, rape, submission, and objectification. Although we may have locked some thoughts away which forced our shadow deeper into the recesses of our minds, as you well know, those shadows that live in our unconscious never go away.

In fact, the less our shadow is embodied into our conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. The ‘better’ we are, the darker our shadow becomes. 

For the biggest part of my young life, I thought sexuality meant straight up missionary, banging one out to please my husband, make babies and create more followers to serve God. Boy, was I misguided. Instead of all THAT, I started to play, first with my 1st grade girlfriend where recess was most exciting in the bathroom stall fondling our nether regions, and by middle school we had a shoe box stashed under our beds filled with chapstick dildos. My god-faring self shoved my kinky self further into the depths however. The church girl I was on the outside, my conscious mind and identity, had a subconscious that became even more vicious and insatiable.

There is a parable about the light wolf and the dark wolf.

The light wolf is made up of love, truth, courage, faith, joy, peace and generosity while the evil wolf is filled with anger, laziness, greed, regret, lies, jealousy, and arrogance. Both live inside everyone and they are in a constant state of war. The old adage is, the wolf you feed the most wins. But this isn’t entirely true, you need to feed them both. If you starve one wolf, the other will become ravenous. If you only focus on the good parts of yourself, your shadow will become resentful, it will hide behind every corner waiting for your defenses to lower at which time it will attack.

Do not shun your shadow, for if you do it will sabotage your life.  

Basic physics and the law of polarity tells us that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The more we try to repress our shadow, the more it will come out. The more you focus on ‘being good’, the more you neglect your ‘bad’ side your shadow will grow in proportion. This may come out in the form of alcoholism and drug abuse, cheating, child abuse, cyclical relationships that don’t go anywhere, the inability to move up in your career, meaningless spending, unfulfilling one-night stands, you get the idea.

Your shadow wants to be acknowledge.

Our taboo self wants acknowledgement that it too is worthy of our attention. It’s not just the good side of us that should receive love, our dark side also needs love. As long as we nurture the conscious as right and resist the unconscious,. until we acknowledge and embrace ALL of our thoughts, they only become more fragmented.  

Until you embrace ALL of your self, even your most dark, twisted, perverted thoughts you will feel like you’re constantly fighting an internal battle. You’ll slink around on FetLife wishing you had the balls to do all those crazy, cool and kinky things you see other people doing, and you’ll wonder why you aren’t. You’ll feel held back and assume victimhood.

Instead of repressing my shadow’s needs and shoving it deeper into the dark, I have learned that stroking my dark side brings a level of self acceptance I never knew possible. This lead to self-content, self-realization, better focus, and thus more power, than I ever imagined possible. Liberating my shadow meant shamelessly owning up to all the immoral, debased, evil, defiled and depraved fragments of my self.

When we embrace our taboo self and bring our shadow into the light is when true empowerment occurs.

For many of us, BDSM and kink is one way we feed our shadow. Looking at Coner’s art, trolling FetLife, stanning our Fet crush, fantasizing out Doublelist hookups, watching porn, getting tied up, pissed on, slapped around, or otherwise engaging in sexually deviant behaviors is a healthy way to feed our shadow. Let me repeat that, our sexually uninhibited selves IS our healthy self. So next time your secret slips out and you’re caught red-handed buying used panties off craigslist, just tell yourself it serves you well to feed your shadow. 

If you don’t nurture both sides of you, one will not simply go away, you cannot suppress either. Both need to live side-by-side. This is the balance of life, embracing both human and divine. Taoists call it the yin and yang, Buddhists the middle way. You need to integrate to become your whole self, and only then will you be free.

Additional Reading

Luna and Sol,  https://lonerwolf.com/

Existential Kink by Carolyn Elliott

Conversations with Coner - the evolution of an artist

“As I’ve become older and my vision has physically changed, so has my artwork. The backgrounds are blurrier and the subject becomes more of the focus”

So you’re less HD-like now and your artwork becomes more intimate, it’s almost like the viewer is a fly on the wall or in the room with you and steps behind the lens as you’re shooting. They have a photographers-eye-view.

“Yes, it’s almost like my world has become more smaller, more engaging, I realized this one day when I was talking a walk through the store and someone was walking towards me and I couldn’t tell what they looked like, I could tell they were slender, and female, but everything else was out of my grasp because I couldn’t physically see them. Then I understood it better when I was taking a walk through the everglades, I was shooting with my camera and everything but what I was looking at was out of focus, more softer. That’s when I realized it was my vision, as I become older, the world around me, everything except for what was around me, was less.”

It’s almost as if you are becoming more in tune with your immediate surroundings, and through your art you’re inviting viewers into a more private space. Do you feel more creative because of it? Are you less aware of distractions, and more focused?

“My other senses feel more heightened, my hearing is more in tune, my sense of smell, touch, and I feel like I can impart that on the viewer more, like its more of a space that is developed and tangible with depth, rather than just a 2 dimensional static image. I actually feel the scene, and I want to try and bring that out in my art.”

You’re not just seeing the world with a heightened sense of awareness, you’re also creating, shaping and molding it differently than in your earlier days. You’ve shifted from the macro lens into a micro lens. Do you feel your artwork has reached deeper depths with this evolutionary process? Are you exploring more taboo subjects, transitioning further out into the fringes of sexuality, beyond societal-imposed boundaries of human desires and thought?

“Exactly, it’s almost like my outer world is reflecting and influencing my inner world, my mind is becoming more focused, my ideas are sort of merging with all the ideas and shoots I’ve done before.”

So I’d say your style now is an amalgamation of everything Coner was before, with a new flair thrown in. It’s as if you’ve broken beyond any restrictions into a new realm of freedom in your artistic process. You’re now doing a lot of exploratory work with airbrushing, screen printing, video journaling… it sounds like this transition has been a massive step for you in your journey as an artist.

“Yes, when my mind needs a break from the shooting and editing, I go and do airbrushing. It’s actually been really interesting. When I go on YouTube and watch videos of people airbrushing, they break all boundaries of what one might think. For example, I’ll see some guy with tattoos and piercings in street clothes and he starts creating an amazing piece of WWII vintage art, and then I’ll see someone who might be a WWII vet and he’s creating unicorns, it’s wild, I love how art allows one to shatter societal expectations".”

In a way that’s what you’re doing with your art, you’re creating an outlet for people to see the world differently, they can step behind your lens and put themselves into a dungeon, or a scene they may have imagined, but not been able to materialize in the physical sense.

~ Coner, August 2020

Momenti Mori

‘Remember you will die'

Momenti Mori is Latin for “remember death” and reminds us to live each day to the fullest.

If you Google the term, you’ll find several different origins. A few of them are:

The ancient practice of reflection on our mortality that goes back to Socrates, who said that the proper practice of philosophy is “about nothing else but dying and being dead.”

The phrase is believed to originate from an ancient Roman tradition in which a servant would be tasked with standing behind a victorious general as he paraded though town.

The early Puritan settlers were particularly aware of death and fearful of what it might mean, so a Puritan tombstone will often display a memento mori intended for the living.

An artistic or symbolic reminder of the inevitability of death. The expression 'memento mori' developed with the growth of Christianity, which emphasized Heaven, Hell, and salvation of the soul in the afterlife.

Moral of the story…. if you’re compelled to dominate, or submit, or have un-lived fantasies….stop waiting for tomorrow. Momenti Mori reminds us to live each day as if we won’t have another one. It goes without saying there are responsible ways of opening pandoras box … visiting Fetlife and making some like-minded new friends for one.

Interview with Coner

“If I can hold a viewer’s gaze for more than 30 seconds then I feel like I’ve accomplished something” 

What do I think about when I shoot? 

When I go into the shoot the ideas are usually already in my head of what the image looks like. I have a plan. Pieces of that plan are usually abandoned during the shoot as they do not work out because the things outside of the control of the photographer or the model. An example would be that the model is not as flexible that day, or there was an injury to work around. Adjustments need to be made.

I do not get physically aroused during the shoots. Its more about the shoot and focusing on problem-solving. I might be physically aroused after the shoot when things calm down. However, I am too exhausted to do anything about it.  Shooting takes a lot out of me.

My images are more about the human.  

I’m sure my concepts come from images I’ve seen in the past or scenarios. They often come to me when I’m in the shower. Remembering what was in my mind is the most difficult part. 

 I do not remember how old I was when I went to my first kink event.  

I think it was right after college.  I must have been about twenty.  It was on a Thursday night at the Wetspot, a club in Seattle now named CSPC.  The event was called the Grind.  It was an introductory dance party.  It was the first time I saw a public BDSM scene. During this time I was also exploring the swinger communities. 

I started out as a bottom.  It seemed like an easy way to get involved.  I did not have to know anything.  After a couple of trips, I experienced my first public sexual encounter.  I had sex with two girls in the back room while others were doing the same around me.  The most memorable part of the experience was the drive home.  I can remember the surreal thoughts, "holy shit that just happened."

- Coner, July 2020