It is the field of erotic expression in art, especially modern and contemporary art, that is the concern of this exhibit: how the marriage of pornography and art transforms both, how the sexual and the visual are tested in this partnership. When incorporated in art, pornography is not only about sexual desire and pleasure; it is something more, eroticism. As the French philosopher and writer Georges Bataille wrote in 1957, "Eroticism, unlike simple sexual activity, is a psychological quest independent of the natural goal: reproduction and the desire for children . . . eroticism is assenting to life even in death." The Bataillean understanding of eroticism -- that our erotic urges terrify us -- informs this exhibit. For it is the frisson of the narrow divide between erotic desire and erotic excess, between acceptable representations of eroticism and ones that cause outrage, that exposes not just the true nature of eroticism but our human trepidation when the erotic is given representational form. Such eroticism draws on the Western metaphysical tradition, the battle between the body and the mind. This struggle -- between Eros and knowledge, emotions and reason, the flesh and the spirit, sexual expression and repression -- is at the heart of erotic art and its power to reinforce dominant ideologies, or to assault them. mds asserts the latter. Given the life-enhancing, pleasurable dimension of the erotic and its potential to challenge rules and defy social and moral boundaries, mds artists are drawn to it for its aesthetic and ideological power. The intersections between art and desire are exactly what we want to explore and the marrying of philosophy and pornography becomes a polemical assault on patriarchal capitalism's enslavement of woman. Context is everything! Our subversive project appropriates the pornographic in order to interrogate art conventions and the art canon. We use the pornographic as an engine of transgression.