EVA DIXON IS MAKING CRASHING SEXY AGAIN
- Sam Moore
- 3 hours ago
- 4 min read
Sex is everywhere. It's on TV and on the internet; it exists in the retro aesthetics of lads mags and suggestive adverts taped to phone boxes around Soho; it's in the sensory appeal of certain materials. Eva Dixon's solo show at Incubator, CRASH, is at its most effective — which is to say, its most charming and sexy — when it not only understands the materials that serve as vectors for erotic engagement, but translates that into a feeling of furtive, tantalising desire.
David Cronenberg, Crash, 1996
CRASH opens with a curatorial coup that charges the work with a tempting, almost forbidden energy. The video store, in popular culture and our collective imagination, is a place that contains an 'adult' section, hidden behind a curtain or door in the corner of the room. There are jokes about it in Friends, and The Simpsons satirises it when the Adult Films section of Lacklustre Video contains, rather than anything pornographic, Merchant-Ivory, Truffaut, and unfunny Woody Allen. The back room on Incubator's first floor offers something similarly adult and titillating, animated by the ways Dixon deploys artefacts of popular culture.
Eva Dixon, Crash, Incubator Gallery, 2026. Installation photography courtesy of Tom Carter.
Stashed away are towers of VHS boxes printed with images: on one, a pair of nude women stare out with endlessly expectant eyes, their bodies adorned with stickers declaring AS SEEN ON TV and SALE: £9.99. Next to it is an imperious image of The Rock circa WWE's Attitude Era, in sunglasses and a leather vest, fist triumphant in the air, topped with the box for the 1986 horror-comedy classic Monster in the Closet. Dixon's wink here is camp in its exaggeration, which is precisely what makes the sculpture, and the hidden, slightly dirty-feeling room, work. They understand not just the omnipresence of sex, but the fact that more often than not, it can be a little silly.
Eva Dixon, Crash, Incubator Gallery, 2026. Installation photography courtesy of Tom Carter.
This may be why the show's highlights come from the slightly non-traditional ways it engages with sex: through materiality and suggestive reference rather than mere explicit imagery. TYRE WORK (2026) stretches tyres across a canvas, the material intervened on by screws and stitches, nails and safety pins. Dixon's work is suggestive here; the memory of the artist's hands in the errant threads of stitching and the placement of the pins brings the promise of touch, and the tactility of the material, to life. This is echoed in SKYLINE (2026), with its cracked black leather and single line of red stitching — not just a sign of something torn apart, from a crash, from a little death, but put back together with intimate tenderness. There is always a temptation to touch an artwork as it hangs on the wall; maybe just a rebellion against the stuffy aura associated with galleries and museums. Dixon leverages this appeal as though it were a form of cruising: the material details draw the eye and, with it, awaken desire and temptation.
Eva Dixon, Crash, Incubator Gallery, 2026. Installation photography courtesy of Tom Carter.
It is ironic, then, that some of the show's more explicit works don't quite land with the same force as these sly, suggestive pieces. Collages like AT HOME AND FRUSTRATED and YOUR ALL OVER MY FACE (both 2026), which pair nude bodies or faces in the throes of pleasure with the suggestive text of their titles, have an immediacy that shocks rather than lingers — the equivalent of pop-ups or webpage ads for adult content. In Dixon's best work, pleasure is a possibility, a promise, or even a joke; here, that layer of suggestion and meaning is stripped away. Sexuality is no longer a performance, with all the joy and play and silliness that entails, but an object.
Eva Dixon, Crash, Incubator Gallery, 2026. Installation photography courtesy of Tom Carter.
Professional wrestling features throughout CRASH: The Rock appears three times, and on the gallery's lower level is an image of wrestler Kurt Angle standing on the hood of a milk truck, throwing cartons of the stuff all over his face and body. Unlike AT HOME AND FRUSTRATED, THE AMERICAN HERO (2007) (2026) does leave a little to the imagination — it manipulates the layers of performance and homoeroticism that are par for the course in WWE, where cameras are obsessed with the details of wrestlers' bodies regardless of gender, and lets you laugh as well as tilt your head in a classic sitcom gesture of curiosity that comes about whenever a character finds themselves watching porn.
Eva Dixon, Crash, Incubator Gallery, 2026. Installation photography courtesy of Tom Carter.
Adorning a wall on the gallery's lower floor is a vast collage that throws an apparently endless amount of material at the onlooker: images, clippings from lads mags, adverts, suggestive puns. Sex is everywhere, and by presenting such a wild array of images together, Dixon proposes that, more than simply being exposed to desire all of the time, we are able to define it for ourselves in a constant, transformational way. Some of this, even within the collage, is done through more explicit imagery: the cover of a 1980s issue of Playboy, a centrefold from ZOO. But elsewhere that giddy eye returns, that knowledge that this isn't something which always needs to be taken seriously: adverts inviting you to get serviced sit next to images of members of the 2000s England men's football side.
Eva Dixon, Crash, Incubator Gallery, 2026. Installation photography courtesy of Tom Carter.
The appeal of Dixon's CRASH is the appeal of eroticism: a funhouse mirror through which you see yourself and the world through a different set of eyes. A fantasy, a temptation, and a promise.
Sam Moore is a journalist and author of All My Teachers Died of AIDS (Pilot Press), Long Live the New Flesh (Polari Press), and Search History (Queer Street Press). They are co-curator of TISSUE.
