SeXObjects
November 29, 2025 - January 17, 2026
Featuring: Abby Aceves, Lavialle Campbell, Jean Lowe, Alia Malley, Valiente Pastel & Elizabeth Scott
Opening Reception: Saturday, December 6, 2025 from 4pm-6pm
Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station Arts Center, 2525 Michigan Avenue, Building B3, Santa Monica, CA 90404
Press Release
Before the internet mediated desire, Generation X—my generation—learned about sex through experience: messy, human, and unfiltered. Our education unfolded in bedrooms, cars, and nightclubs entered with fake IDs, soundtracked by the ragged defiance of Courtney Love and the unapologetic fury of 1990s riot grrrl feminism. Unlike our younger counterparts, we came of age—and defined ourselves sexually—before the onslaught of internet porn and the slow erosion of intimacy brought on by smartphones and digital distraction. In an era when a screen can dull the libido and physical sex is in decline, that pre-internet reality of tangible, erotic self-discovery feels like a bygone luxury, as imperfect as it was.
SeXObjects at Craig Krull Gallery playfully and earnestly revisits that visceral era, when intimacy was chaotic, risky, and real—before swipes, screens, and algorithms reprogrammed how we connect and feel. Fueled by nostalgia and yearning, the exhibition invites viewers back into a tactile, pre-internet universe, when desire was discovered in the hushed corners of sex shops, the thrill of a secret club, or the glossy pages of a magazine—through the work of six artists whose contributions are challenging, personal, honest, and sex-positive.
With her signature blend of wit and cultural critique, artist Jean Lowe presents Newsstand (Cracker Barrel), a life-sized magazine stand stocked with hand-painted papier-mâché facsimiles of vintage issues of Playboy and Hustler. Lowe reflects on how once-“naughty” images—artfully photographed nudes paired with serious journalism—now seem “almost wholesome in relation to the online and anonymous, fast, fragmented, decontextualized and stimulation/gratification focused sexual media of today.” Lowe’s work brings us back to a private nostalgia, recalling the thrill of finding a hidden copy of an adult magazine in a parent’s drawer, while offering a meditation on the dizzying pace of cultural change around the subject of sex.
Interdisciplinary artist Alia Malley presents Laid, a custom scent that conjures the messy, smoky, chaotic intimacy of pre-internet sexual adolescence. Notes of boozy dive bars, second-hand leather jackets, cigarettes, and charged static evoke nights full of chemistry, adventure, and sticky vulnerability. Housed in a vintage CK One bottle that denotes the transitional era of the 1990s, the scent is an invitation: viewers can dip a blotter into the open bottle and carry it through the gallery, engaging with desire on their own terms. “Everything was grainy with sloppy borders, like a 35mm party photo from a Yashica T4.” Malley writes, “There were complex systems at work, but they were human—instinctual and organic in nature, not machine-driven or derived. We had no idea what we were doing, but we did it anyway.”
Elizabeth Scott’s ceramic “t-shirts” act like mixtapes of memory, desire, and longing. Drawing on her upbringing in San Jose, California and the Bay Area’s queer counterculture, Scott translates the secret codes of underground sexual communities into tactile, sculptural forms. Her adroit handling of clay brings the folds and creases of her t-shirts to life, as if they carry the intimacy of having been recently worn by a young body. She writes: “Before the internet collapsed everything into the same screen, desire moved differently. I learned (about sex) through record stores, books, mom and pop video shops, and whatever I could get my hands on. I became fascinated by how people used codes: language, fashion, symbols, visual cues. These signals created informal systems of trust and recognition, where access often depended on being able to read between the lines. This work pulls from that visual and emotional language: leather bar flyers, Folsom Street Fair photos, and the subtler cues embedded in music, television, and film. It is a love letter to California’s history of self-invention and the ways people have carved out space for identity, kink, and intimacy, often by hiding things in plain sight.”
Artist Abby Aceves channels adolescent memories of desire and defiance into Ezequiel, a bondage mask that is both a symbol of temptation and transformation. Employing the fine leatherwork and resin detailing that define her recent practice, Aceves gives physical form to the “forbidden” thrills and impulses that society has long sought to repress. Rooted in recollections of a “sinful” sexual awakening, her work confronts the shame and silence historically imposed on women’s pleasure. By reclaiming and materializing these impulses, Aceves challenges the cultural narrative that female desire must remain concealed under a mask of modesty. As she writes, “My work explores this tension—the space between repression and freedom, guilt and pleasure. I reclaim those hidden feelings and give them form. I want to challenge the narrative that female desire is something to be concealed. By confronting these taboos openly, I hope to create space for others to see that sexuality, in all its complexity, can be a source of power, self-understanding, and liberation.”
Costa Rican artist Valiente Pastel is drawn to what has been forgotten, discarded, or deemed inappropriate, transforming it into work that is intimate, poetic, and provocative—often using found materials such as vintage porn magazines and everyday objects. In his recent series, he paints playfully over the explicit imagery of vintage erotic playing cards, reimagining them as objects that capture the tactile, sensorial pleasures of erotic imagination in a pre-digital age.
Multimedia artist Lavialle Campbell is often motivated by the personal pleasure of meticulous craft. For SeXObjects, she offers Fringed, a luxurious hot pink, flocked butt plug layered with 10,000 Czech glass seed beads, loomed and strung on bonded nylon thread. The texture renders the object extremely tempting, daring the viewer to reach out and touch it.
Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station Arts Center, 2525 Michigan Avenue, B3, Santa Monica, CA 90404. Press inquiries can be directed to Diana Fitzgibbon at diana@hannahsloan.com.
/ Artist Bios
Abby Aceves (b. 1985, Nogales, Sonora, México) is a self-taught painter and interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. After earning a bachelor’s degree from the Superior Fashion Center Edith Martin in Jalisco, Mexico, she spent seven years working in fashion before turning to fine arts. Her work explores identity, sensuality, and transformation through a combination of painting, sculpture, and textile-based techniques. Aceves’s work has been exhibited at The Cheech Museum, the San Diego Museum of Art, Modern Eden, Brand Library and Art Center, and the Consulate General of Mexico, and is part of the AltaMed Collection. She is a 2024–2025 Lakers “In the Paint” Grant recipient.
Lavialle Campbell is a multimedia artist based in Los Angeles whose work bridges traditional craft and contemporary abstraction. Working with fabric, thread, and a home sewing machine, she creates tactile quilts, sculptural forms, and beadwork that reimagine materials associated with women’s labor. Her practice explores both pleasure and discipline in making, often addressing themes of identity, intimacy, and history. Campbell studied at Otis College of Art and Design, Santa Monica College, and UCLA, where she trained with artists including Lisa Adams, Laddie John Dill, George Herms, and Roland Young.
Jean Lowe is a painter and installation artist based in Encinitas, California. Drawing from traditions of decorative and conceptual art, her work employs humor and ornament to examine cultural values, environmental politics, and gendered spaces. Lowe’s installations often transform the visual language of domestic interiors into critiques of consumerism and power. She received her MFA from the University of California, San Diego, where she later taught until 2008. Her work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, and is held in numerous public collections.
Alia Malley (California, USA) works across photography, video, and scent to explore how environments reflect systems of power and perception. Her interdisciplinary practice reveals the porous boundaries between nature, technology, and human influence, often using scent as a time-based extension of the photographic image. Malley holds a BA in Critical Film Studies from the University of Southern California and an MFA in Visual Arts from UC Riverside. Her work is included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the UCLA Library Special Collections, and the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection. She lives and works near Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Valiente Pastel (b. 1989) is a Costa Rican artist whose collage and mixed-media works explore queerness, desire, and social struggle. Working with found materials such as vintage porn magazines and discarded prints, he transforms what is forgotten or forbidden into something intimate and poetic. Through fluid, dreamlike imagery, Pastel reclaims narratives of vulnerability and resistance within marginalized communities. His work has been exhibited at the Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo in San José, Costa Rica, and is held in the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection.
Elizabeth Scott grew up in the Bay Area and earned her BFA in Ceramics from California State University, Long Beach. She is currently pursuing her MFA at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University and is a 2024 recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant. Working predominantly in clay, she emphasizes the tactile qualities of expression and gesture to explore the body's relationship to memory, grief, trauma, and its capacity for hope, often reflecting both personal and collective experiences from a feminist perspective.