You Won't Believe What This Painting Is Made Of

Check out that super cool painting up there. Would you believe that artist Faith Holland created "Ookie Canvas 1" out of semen — specifically, out of digitally-altered anonymous "money shots?" No? Well I have big news for you, buddy, because that is exactly what she did for her first solo show, Technophilia.

"Technophilia as a whole looks at the sexualized nature of our relationship to technology," Holland told Bustle via email. "We use our devices to access sex and pornography and they then become libidinally charged... When we look at porn on our phone at night, fall asleep with it in the same bed, when we caress its surface in the morning to check our email, there's still a lusty residue."

The show includes her previous series, "Visual Orgasms," which uses GIFs to poke fun at the way media implies sex through objects. Trains entering tunnels, cucumbers, and even eating fruit suggestively have all been frequently used as stand-ins for sex, often to get around censors, and Holland writes that this obsession with visual innuendo is a result of "pressure that Hollywood felt to represent orgasm visually — even under self-imposed rules not to." Similarly, the money shot in pornography "'proves' the veracity of the pleasure in the scene."

Unsurprisingly, "Ookie Canvas I" didn't come together all at once. "I knew I wanted to work with actual cum shots directly, but it took me a while to find the right method," Holland said. In the end, she put out a call for submissions from "any and all genders as long as it is fluid emitted as the result of an orgasm," ArtSlant reports. After the cum shots were isolated and altered, the results were put together to create "Ookie Canvas I."

In case you're wondering, she does know of at least one woman who submitted an image, although most of the submissions were "cropped and ambiguous."

When asked what made her specifically interested in semen, Holland told ArtSlant that it was "the imbalance of visualizing pleasure that happens... It indicates male pleasure and not female pleasure."

Preach, girl. If you're in the area, Technophilia is on display at TRANSFER, a gallery in Brooklyn, until July 11th. Images: Courtesy of Faith Holland