(Fore)playing with Fire

Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle want to change your view of the climate crisis with their new documentary, Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency, screening at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. Sprinkle is a legendary multi-media performance artist and former sex worker. She got her start in New York in the 1970s with explicit and challenging pieces about gender and sex. Stephens, Sprinkle’s longtime partner, is an artist and art professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The couple didn’t originate the ecosexuality term, but have framed much of their recent work around “shifting the idea of Earth as mother to Earth as lover,” Stephens says. Playing with Fire is Sprinkle and Stephens’ third film inspired by that notion. It tells the story of the devastating 2020 CZU