PHOTO BY LENI

Katrina del Mar's clitismic chronicles materialized late last month on the dark, dewy inner surfaces of Manhattan's Clit Club...in a projection installation celebrating the photog's latest "PlushToy" catalog of fleshly images and artifacts.

Here, in what is probably the deepest, wettest recess of this particular American night, del Mar's visions...drawn from outposts and inposts of erotic extremism ranging from the East Village and San Francisco to Florida's Gold Coast and other sundry nowheresvilles along the way...pulsate with the carnal catechism on which she has erected her Church of Pussy.

Del Mar's probing lens navigates the visual territory between sacred and profane in an arcane rite of virtual alchemy she describes as "sweating gasoline and looking for a match".

"I kill doubt and present you with the rage, the sex, the intimate face of your goddess", elucidates del Mar for The Soft Toy Dept.

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"What makes me fit into the BME scene? I was influenced by the practice of 'delicate cutting', which I and several of my friends indulged in out of the great anguish of post-molestation adolescence. This is not a happy story at all. I've heard it described as a method by which a girl in great emotional pain can put the pain in a place where it makes sense...on the physical body, in plain sight."

"One of my great influences is Kembra Pfahler, who has that great anchor tattoo on her arm. She proclaims to have had her hand tattooed so that she'd never have to have a straight job -- which to me as a working-class type seems very brave. Kembra's ideas, sense of style and influences are all so completely bizarre, at once very rarefied and very pedestrian, Schwarzkogler and "Orgy of The Dead", Sixteenth Century witch torture and Diet Pepsis. She's told me about performances she's done where afterwards she had to be hospitalized, because too much blood was let."

Del Mar's vision quest is energized with the fervid perfectionism of the The Bad Catholic who has eschewed The Virgin for The Whore -- an erotomorphic insiderism evoked, in words too memorable not to quote here, by Village Voice culture critic Ed Morales in his review of the Fall, 1996 "Picture This..." exhibit of "36 edgy photographers exploring a dark 'n nasty world of plain fun":

If there was a predominant ethos on the walls, it was the war against what photographer Katrina del Mar called "Hatred of the female body, that New Age horror." Del Mar, whose Passaic [New Jersey] upbringing infused her with a love for decay and ruin, relished the messy, bloody rage in her nude subjects.

"Here's a transsexual from Florida", she mused. "I gave her a hammer and told her to rip stuff apart." She played with a necklace that spelled out "I LOVE TWAT" and bragged "Beth B. asked me if she could photograph my pussy..."

Incantatory, intimately distanced images of life and lowlife among today's restless lesbian youth have established del Mar as the authoritative doumentrix of riot grrll and pussycore culture -- burnt into the underground's collective retina with a vividity that recalls Marcia Resnick's and Bob Gruen's images of doomed Seventies / early Eighties punkers and glitterati ranging from Sid Vicious to John Sex. And in contradistinction to the vanished scenesters populating Gruen's and Resnick's work, the primarily female inhabitants of del Mar's ouvre are clearly determined, like Katrina del Mar herself, to keep their spirits firmly anchored in their flesh.

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PHOTO BY LENI