Starting 1 August until 12 September 2010 the ABC Treehouse in Amsterdam is hosting the group exhibition "Naughty but nice", RopeMarks will be present with five pieces (*proud* :).

This is what the Treehouse says about the exhibtion:

Naughty but Nice is the follow-up to the groundbreaking Happy exhibit, which began in 2006 as the largest exhibition of gay and lesbian artists in the Netherlands, and by its fourth edition (2009) had grown enough to question its own premise: what, actually, is 'gay' art? Are we helping - or stereotyping - the artist by promoting him/her in a 'gay' exhibition? The 2009 edition of Happy was a particularly good example of this conundrum: pieces like "Symphonic Red Chairs" by Etienne Go - a brilliant photographic study of the Jay Pritzker Pavilion - could be seen as 'gay art' only when the viewer was informed of the sexuality of the artist.

Exploring this question, the curators of Happy (Harald Seiwert and Rene Zuiderveld) and the director of the ABC Treehouse (Donna DuCarme) came to the conclusion that many people, when thinking of 'gay art', imagine erotic poses and skimpily clad models. But this begs a further question: why does a 400 year old nude elicit praise and critical analysis, but photos of a nude 60 year old woman elicit outrage and criticism? Is it really a struggle between Rubens and Playboy, or are we uncomfortable with the idea of seeing a woman over a certain age as a sexual person? Why is a photo of a buffed, underwear-clad man "advertising" when it's a giant billboard on Broadway, but "gay" when it's a photograph hanging on the Treehouse walls? When are high heels high fashion, and when are they kinky? Can one man's gay art be another woman's romantic pose? Would a rose still look as sweet, when painted by someone who doesn't share your sexual orientation?

In Naughty But Nice, Seiwert, Zuiderveld and DuCarme invite some of our favorite HoLeBi artists from the Happy exhibits to join with some new Het artists to explore erotic art. These artists, in accepting this challenge, challenge all of us, in turn, to look at our ideas of gender, sexuality...and art.

flyer front	flyer back

Bob

The glamour bound update is a team-up of a fantastic photographer, the Dutch bondage diva Chantal and the amazing Dutch Dame. The pleasure of rigging both was Bob's.

In four individual sets Dutch Dame gets beautifully rigged emphasizing her body. Next Chantal gets rigged emphasizing her wonderful curves. Then it's time to put the both of them together in a sensual bondage, finally the cuteness of both is brought out in a simple wrists together bondage.

This update gives you 4 sets of beautiful glamour bondage shots of the amazing Dutch Dame and Bondage Diva Chantal.

The Links:
 Club RopeMarks, Glamour Bound.

RopeMarks has been a personal project for years (and a full business for the last few years), focusing on the beauty of Japanese bondage in particular and bondage in general. At no point in the past have we ever considered RopeMarks to be more than a personal project, a way to satisfy exhibisionistic tendencies, a way to happily geek with the technology of the web and still produces something useful. However, because of our web precense and the (Japanese) bondages we showed we got people interested; interested to just watch, to learn it themselves or have us show it at their event.

One of the returning questions we received was "what type of rope do you use?" and "where can I get it?". This made us decide to start selling rope for (Japanese) bondage through the RopeMarks website. After a while we stopped, selling rope ready for bondage in the quality we want was way to time consuming. We wanted to focus on actually doing bondage.

Selling rope through the RopeMarks website was however the first version of our webshop. From that point on there have been several versions of our webshop selling different items. All items related to the things we personally create or like in (Japanese) bondage and BDSM.

Growth from our part and demand from the community made us decide to detached the webshop from the RopeMarks site and move it to its own domain, et voilà, that is where we are now.

The Links
 Shop RopeMarks

Recently we had something fun happen to us. We got contacted with a request for a high quality image of one of our photo's. The reason was they wanted to hang it on their bedroom wall. To not make the story longer than need to be:

Here's the original from our portfolio:

And here's the end result in someone else's bedroom:

This makes us really proud :)

Bob

It is always... enjoyable to be recognized, thanx guys (any girls?)! 

In August-September 2007 we will be in California.

BoundCon (Munchen, Germany) a three day fetish and bondage extravagance is starting in a few days (Jul. 21-23). We're there for the for the whole fair. If you want to see us perform live or finally like a change to say hi, come meet us in our stand!

Is it possible that our Dutch national TV network is picking up on our oh so beloved shibari? We have been approached by the people of the Dutch TV program "Bizar & Bijzonder" (Bizar and Extraordinary) if we are interested in participating. We had some e-mail exchange, watched a few episodes and had a real/live meeting about the subject. We decided to participate. Today we are being filmed and it should air in about 2 weeks. When we know more we'll post it here.