Web of Love
January 29, 2026 – March 13, 2026
The Harold J. Miossi Art Gallery is pleased to present Web of Love, an immersive video installation by Samantha Nye that reimagines a 1966 Scopitone film of the same title through a contemporary, queer lens. Scopitone films—often considered precursors to today’s music videos—were originally viewed in 1960s and 1970s nightclubs on machines that combined jukeboxes and television screens. Nye’s near shot-by-shot adaptation stars Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, with music by Erin Markey, and was filmed on location in San Luis Obispo at the Madonna Inn, Sycamore Springs, and within a completely fabricated, custom-built, faux heart-shaped hot tub suite inspired by 1970s romance resorts.
Carpeted wall-to-wall in lipstick-red shag, the exhibition centers on an interactive sculptural lounge embedded with four pink, heart-shaped hot tubs sourced directly from the iconic (and now defunct) Poconos Palace Honeymoon Resort. This lush, participatory environment draws visitors into the world of the video, offering a plush space to recline, linger, and experience the four-channel video installation alongside a series of video sculptures. Blending nostalgia, intimacy, and humor, Web of Love invites audiences to consider how desire, care, and fantasy are shaped by architecture, media, and shared social space.
Special Event
Art Talk: Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens Plus Screening of Playing with Fire: An
Exosexual Emergency
January 28, 2026, 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Preview Here
The Harold J. Miossi Art Gallery, in cooperation with the Cuesta Performing Arts Center, is pleased to present Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency, a feature-length documentary by Annie Sprinkle, Ph.D., and Beth Stephens. Both artists are Guggenheim Fellows and longtime collaborators whose work spans performance, film, sexuality studies, and environmental activism. The film was shaped by the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex fires in Northern California, which forced the artists to evacuate their redwood forest home and catalyzed a deeply personal and collective reckoning with fire, loss, and renewal.
Created through an ecosexual lens—imagining the Earth as a lover rather than a resource—Playing with Fire blends documentary storytelling with ritual, humor, and community care. The film weaves together voices of artists, formerly incarcerated firefighters, Indigenous scholars, neighbors, and performers to explore how climate catastrophe intersects with social justice and queer resilience. Rather than positioning fire solely as a force of destruction, the film asks how we might learn to live with fire as a regenerative, transformative presence.
Part documentary, part performance, and part call to action, Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency offers an urgent yet hopeful meditation on intimacy, ecology, and survival in a world increasingly defined by environmental crisis.
Get Tickets Here