Four Chambers: Vex Ashley’s porn studio makes art from sex’s messy complexity

Twelve years ago, Vex Ashley was a restless art student at odds with professors who found her work too feminine, too feeling. Frustrated by the sterility of academic critique, she went searching for a creative outlet that felt more alive — and found it in porn. It was the early 2010s, when Tumblr reigned as the pastel-tinted stomping ground for the internet’s resident hipsters — a digital collage of poetry, film stills and nudes. A new era of self-published pornography was born and it was moody, horny and utterly experimental. What began as Vex posting a few erotic videos online soon evolved into Four Chambers: a collaborative studio blurring the boundaries between sex and art. Through this act of defiance, she discovered pornography to be a medium of genuine creative freedom, a space unbound by the politeness of the art world. 

The DIY collective makes films that are unapologetically explicit and conceptually rich, transforming cinema into a site of experimentation for the mind and body. Their latest project, Echo Chamber, is their boldest yet — part erotic performance, part psychological study. Shot inside a mirrored box, performers are forced to confront images of their body from every angle. It’s as hypnotic as it is overstimulating, a meditation on the digital age and what it means to live, fuck and perform in a world that never stops watching. The space brings scrolling through timelines to life, capturing the paradox of how the desire to be seen can feel both intoxicating and suffocating. True to form, Four Chambers doesn’t offer clear conclusions. It transforms pornography into philosophical inquiry, asking what happens when arousal becomes indistinguishable from performance. 

Has your work furthered your own personal development in terms of sexual liberation?

The incredible thing about working within this industry is you’re really pushing at the limits of societal comfort. You see yourself reframed in ways that have unimaginable benefits to your own exploration. Working with my image and pushing the boundaries of what feels comfortable feels like self-divination and artistic expression. In many ways, I’m pushing the limits of my tolerance with my own body. Sometimes, it does genuinely feel like a transcendent and connected experience. Through the magic of sexual connection, you leave set with this incredible high. It comes from being able to be so intimate and vulnerable with people who are relative strangers. That can bring a really powerful sense of closeness.

What do you think of the increasing socio-political restrictions on the porn industry?

I’m thirty-five now and growing up online, porn was a completely unregulated space of infinite possibility. But with those infinite possibilities, stuff can get complicated. We’re seeing the rollback of freedoms in many ways and kind of understandably. But I don’t think these restrictions are restricted to just porn, it includes a lot of content. We’re looking at our use of the digital space and rightfully thinking, What the fuck are we doing? Porn gets the brunt of these restrictions because sex is such a sensitive topic. But I think porn doesn’t get enough credit for how it massively expands our perception of sex. It’s exploratory and playful. It’s an expression of the fundamental things that makes us human. We should be able to make creative work about sex and show it to people, and watch it and be turned on. 

What are the repercussions of these restrictions?

I think we are losing a key part of our culture but I can understand why people would want to take a step back from that. But it also feels like a blunt instrument that’s cutting the whole thing off at the knees. It’s not going to go away. It’s essentially going to make sex return to this very homogenous, safe and heteronormative, polite way of doing things because that’s going to be the only thing that’s readily available. We’re going to see a huge loss of expressions of experimental sex and queer sex. I’m not against changing the way we interact with the digital space but I feel like the anti-porn push is isolating us from each other further and is labelling sex as something scary, dangerous and to be avoided.

Do you think we’re living in an age of sexual voyeurism in the digital age?

We are living in a hugely attention-focused economy. Previously, only celebrities were watched and commodified into advertisements. There was this real hierarchy between them and normal people. The internet has democratised that and it means there is this expectation for us all to become personal brands. More people are becoming influencers, where we’re selling ourselves as opposed to just being. It feels complicated to exist in a space where everything feels so hyper-commodified and individualised. We’re all competing for attention all of the time and I think that’s true for sex, too. There’s a push to perform sex as opposed to embodying it. But there is also something incredibly hot about watching yourself and being seen as a sexual image. It’s a powerful place to be. We want to watch other people and we want to be watched. It’s this paradox. It’s part of human nature. We’re social creatures that want to be seen and desired.

How do you navigate protecting your privacy and engaging in online sex work?

We’re encouraged to shy away from these things because the idea of fucking up feels so weighted — you can’t fuck up in private anymore. Everything is public and you’re being observed all the time. You’re on the record for the rest of your life. That makes me scared and that’s why I’ve taken a step back from the way I used to interact with the internet online. The thing about working with sex is you never know how the public consciousness is going to shift for good or bad in the future. You also never know how technology is going to shift. What I’ve realised is that actual visibility is a curse more than a blessing because you’re putting yourself out there very publicly. For my own sense of self, I’ve really prioritised going back to what feels good, which is returning to physical, face to face events and connections.

How do you create ethical porn?

Ethical porn is one of these phrases that is being thrown around a lot. I don’t use that label because I believe that ethics around sex are subjective person to person. I think it plays into the idea that porn is dirty and bad. I’ve known people who work with mainstream companies where they’ve been paid incredibly well and treated great. I’ve also had friends perform with companies considered to be ethical and feminist where they’re not treated well. A lot of the time I think the term ‘ethical porn’ gets tied up in this idea of what the porn actually looks like, rather than how it’s made and the working practices of the company. 

How do you ensure the pornography you’re creating is safe? 

As a director, I try to make porn that I would like to perform in myself and prioritise the idea of transparency. We go into as many details as possible about how the company is run, what we pay performers, what a set day looks like for us, and how we work. I want to try and prioritise the performer experience. Performer pay should be as high as possible and I try not to be super prescriptive about what needs to happen on set. You should have flexibility built into your expectations.

How do you navigate creative direction and have flexibility built into your practice?

We have general guidelines for what we’d like to shoot aesthetically and conceptually, but it’s not storyboarded. And if there are specific things we would like shot, we pre-negotiate that with the performers. The best sex is performer-led interactions. They’re more in tune with their bodies and their performance than I can ever be as a passive observer. It’s allowing people to be nuanced and vulnerable with what feels right on the day and not being overly precious about what we’re shooting. 

How was your new project, Echo Chamber, born?

I’d been looking at all the time I’ve spent online and what it means for me to have been working with my own image for so long. I’ve stared at myself reflected on camera for years and I wondered what effect constantly curating your image has on your sexuality. What does it mean to grow up in a world where sexuality is essentially flattened into an image and then projected back to you? So, I became obsessed with this idea of fucking in a hall of mirrors because that’s what shooting porn feels like sometimes. It was touching on how hot it is to watch yourself and at what point does that become overstimulating. We built the set ourselves in my spare room. And when I was in it, it was such an uncomfortable experience. It became so apparent that it was the correct medium to talk about this idea. You get pulled into this narcissistic pool of staring at things on your body you don’t like, and it really highlighted exactly what I was trying to talk about in the first place.

What was shooting in the hall of mirrors like?

Shooting it was an uncomfortable experience. You’re trapped in this sweaty box for hours so it’s psychologically uncomfortable. You’re essentially trapped in a prison of your own self. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant experience. But it was a very fun film to shoot. It’s the idea of realising that we’re so completely oversaturated with images of not only other people but also ourselves. 

What do you want your audience to take away from Echo Chamber?

I would love for people to feel like we’re not just necessarily showing the graphic explicitness of sex, but we’re conveying the atmosphere of how sex feels in the body, or the intensity of how it feels in your imagination. Even if someone doesn’t find the sex on screen hot, I would love for them to find it visually or conceptually interesting. We want to show sex in a way you haven’t seen before, and leave you with a feeling of curiosity and wanting to explore your desire more intensely. We’re making porn that is talking about topics other than sex, like technology. Porn is a product of the society we exist in and, if you look at porn, it reflects the dynamics in that society. How do we hold sex in all its messy complexity and how do we use art to explore that? And I think that’s something that is valuable and hot and interesting.