Sam Ashby’s film Sanctuary (2024), which forms the centerpiece of this solo exhibition, examines the architectural and psychic remains—and perhaps under-explored potential—of a queer spiritual community founded, in the seventies, by onetime film director Christopher Larkin. When Larkin’s 1974 directorial debut, the gay romantic drama A Very Natural Thing, met a lukewarm critical and audience reception, he reacted in the way gay men throughout history have confronted such disappointments: by packing his bags and fashioning himself a new identity. Larkin lived nomadically for much of the remaining decade, sustained by family money and the liberating atmospheres of Fire Island and San Diego, before re-emerging as the sexual guru Peter Christopher Purusha Androgyne Larkin. The pursuit of all-consuming spiritual ecstasy by means of fisting, and other anally focused activities, formed the basis of his teachings. These were inflected equally by New Age pop psychology and, more improbably (or not), by his experiences as a young Catholic monk. The prophet set forth his doctrine in his book The Divine Androgyne According to Purusha (1981), a remarkable document of then-nascent fetish culture which documents his quest for “cosmic erotic ecstasy in an Androgyne bodyconscious,” seeking extreme sexual pleasure as a method of obliterating …