Lindsay Dye’s blue-lit bedroom is cluttered in the way that an antique shop might be. Years’ worth of knick-knacks and art dominate every wall and surface—unfinished paintings, photographs, plush dolls, books, statuettes, a whip. Incense burn and permeate the air while her cat, Eggalina, rests to the tune of Lil Peep’s last album. There’s a large Dunkin Donuts iced coffee sitting in front of her desktop Mac; she worked late the night before. Her computer sits atop a pink desk with its screen facing the bed. Aside from in-person and event performances, this is where she works. And as a camgirl and an artist, her business and studio hours often blend into one another.

Since starting out as a camgirl—someone who regularly performs or models in sexually-driven video chatrooms—in 2013, it has been Dye’s goal to have her artwork and sex work coincide. The practices have always fed off of each other, but started to more actively overlap about two years ago when she sat on her first cake. It was part of a performance series at a bar called “Berlin” in Brooklyn; she baked two cakes, downloaded 2 Chainz’s “Birthday Song,” and gave into the impulse. At that point, she’d been camming for three years and was starting to notice a trend in her chatrooms. “First they wanted me to sit on my cat,” she explains. “Sitting and crushing fetishes start out with small animals and insects, and it’s implied that they want you to crush or suffocate them. So I wanted to turn this kind of disturbing fetish into something positive and more pure.”

After browsing through videos of women sitting on various objects, Dye says she came across cake-sitting, often referred to as “sploshing,” and was intrigued. “Everyone has a relationship with cake. It’s a part of our lives in some way, mostly celebratory, kind of childlike and exaggerated. I thought bringing a fetish from a niche, dark part of the internet into a public space where an audience has to deal with it would really subvert the idea of fetish, [the idea] that it’s supposed to be private.” Dye’s work deals in dualities—public and private, artwork and sex work, online and offline, comedy and intimacy, sadness and horniness, anger and intrigue. By drawing out and examining these unfamiliar, sometimes conflicting mental correspondences, her performance art becomes a social experiment. Watching the cake-sitting can be anywhere from thrilling to depressing. Some performances are explosive with Dye bouncing to the music, rubbing the icing on her body, grinding on cake remnants. Others can be more somber, purposefully apathetic. In either situation, it’s sensational.

The idea is to convert a chatroom member into an art enthusiast and an art enthusiast into a porn spectator.

Whether in-person or online, Dye sits with her back to the audience, usually in lingerie or a tiny swimsuit. During live performances she typically sings to an instrumental track —slow R&B or a somber love song—while she twerks on and then destroys a frosted cake, mainly with her butt. Once the music is over and the cake is in crumbles, she flees the scene. “The idea is to convert a chatroom member into an art enthusiast and an art enthusiast into a porn spectator. The subversion happens when the audience reflects on their environment, their context. There’s a flip of expectations in both cases.” During her chatroom shows, the audience watches Dye bake a cake, however, she will only perform a sitting if viewers raise enough money and meet the “tip goal” she sets. Muted fluorescents and glimmering wall art surround her bed, personalizing her on-screen ambience. Each one of the 11 rooms she’s lived in since moving to New York eight years ago has been curated with her camming audience in mind. Her art and decor tell them a little bit about her personality, although she acknowledges “they only want to know so much.” Having her back to the camera only seems appropriate.

Setting manipulation and context subversion have continually informed Dye’s artistic development, alongside her trajectory in the sex industry. She first entered the camming community by taking screenshots for what would be her first camgirl-related art piece, “Camgirls Copyright Infringement Dress: Cannot Be Worn In Public”. The piece involves an actual spandex dress that now hangs on a clothing rack in the corner of her room, next to a display of mismatched lingerie. It’s about calf-length with long sleeves, covered in hundreds of the previously mentioned screenshots. “I would show this dress in galleries as a sculpture, [to ensure] that it wouldn’t leave the gallery space as some type of commercial piece of art. It still maintained a level of privacy.”

That dress led to Dye’s experimentation with camming, “Five years later, here I am. I’m in it and I’ve made so many art projects about it,” she pulls out a set of three paintings. “These are portraits I made of people who fell asleep in chat rooms. Besides selling art on the side and event performances here and there, [camming is] my sole income.” Being able to control her environment gives Dye the safety and autonomy she hadn’t found in other forms of sex work. She notes a mental and emotional benefit from not having to physically interact with her clients. “Coming from Miami, I started being exposed to strip club culture when I was 12 or 13,” she says. “By the time I was in grad school for art, I remember thinking about camming like stripping online. It seemed so much more private and like there wouldn’t be the power imbalance I observed when I was younger. I wouldn’t have to be with other physical bodies. I would be by myself. ”

Now, as a camgirl herself and the subject of screenshot copyright infringement, Dye continues where the dress left off, around the idea of appropriating other’s work and images. From a quick Google search, she finds countless images and videos that people have obtained from her chatroom, without her knowledge, and are attempting to sell online. For her ongoing project, Buy Me Offline, she is re-selling the content that was stolen from her, as well as whatever physical pieces of art are featured in the original picture or video. “I’m okay with the stolen content because it’s become my archive. I can type in my name and see how much I’ve worked, all the apartments I’ve lived in, how I’ve physically changed. It’s this scrapbook that somebody’s making for me,” she reflects. “It doesn’t have to be this negative thing.” This is more or less the thesis of her self-proclaimed “sex work/art work” practice; a rejection of negativity through reclamation and playful context manipulation. There are several pictures of her around the room, one of which looks like an early internet meme. “WHEN YOU C2C AND HE FINE AF” the white text reads above an image of Dye laying on her bed in a bikini, rounding her mouth. She tells me this is one of the stolen images that she’s using in a new series, #RealCamgirlMemes, and “C2C” means “cam-to-cam” in chatroom lingo. A few pink-toned sculptures, made of insulation foam and other soft-looking plastics, punctuate the walls. Like sitting on a cake, there’s a cartoonish, tongue-in-cheek element to these memes and sculptures.

Dye speaks with an unshaken confidence. She can’t remember the last time she faced criticism for her work. “I think it’s because I take myself really seriously,” she asserts. In addition to bake sales, art openings and parties, she has recently done three charity cake-sittings to raise money for the hurricanes in Houston and Puerto Rico and the Black Lives Matter foundation. Her “Camgirl Resume” shirts advertise and support sex workers, and she educates her audiences on social media and in chatrooms about ethical camming practices and the less glamorous elements of sex work.

Still, she can laugh at herself, thrusting into a baked good, without losing the slightest bit of poise or integrity.

Hair: Clara Leonard
Makeup: Tiffany Patton