My Deep Secret - a two-person show by Reba Maybury and Will Sheldon - is showing at Arcadia Missa un
MY DEEP SECRET
Reba Maybury & Will Sheldon
7th July – 3rd August 2018
Opening Hours: Wednesday – Saturday 11-6pm
'A small room, wallpapered with canvas bearing the work of painter, illustrator, and tattoo artist Will Sheldon. In the center of the room, writer, artist, and dominatrix Reba Maybury has placed a vitrine containing artifacts submitted by her submissives, having asked them for things that reflect their interests and cultural taste. The resulting experience is immersive and museum-like, almost rococo.
As noted by Maybury (Mistress Rebecca to her submissives)–vitrines are most often seen holding “the stolen objects of colonized peoples”. Here instead are donated objects occasionally accompanied by devotional blurbs, little dedications of fear and admiration for their Mistress. Among several portraits done in the likeness of Mistress Rebecca, one screen-print of her visage and neck dominates against a backdrop of the wild cosmos and is punctuated not with a body, but an enormous stiletto PVC boot. We see a framed sheet of Holiday Inn stationary bearing handwritten lyrics to the Red Hot Chili Peppers song “Dosed.” The lyrics are telling of the shallow adoration (and perhaps resentment) this sub feels for the artist: “I got dosed by you, and closer than most to you, and what am I supposed to do, take it away, I never had it anyway…” One photograph from a sub, titled “€350 down the drain”, features his recently purchased “practical” apparel. Jeans and a leather bomber jacket–an expensive, self-conscious and milquetoast derivative of the archetypal mid-century bad boy. The submissives’ oblations are not, in a superficial sense, secretive. Most are ludicrously earnest, but they bely a stagnating self-awareness. The piece is a exploration of absurdity in banality, or as Maybury describes it, “the museum of redundant masculinity.”
Will Sheldon’s brilliantly painted “wallpaper,” as well as other works of his, tend towards a psychedelic playfulness and furtivity. There are sneaky, mischievous, reticent creatures; the objects they spy, snuffle, and pad amongst; and the stirring relationship between them. Sheldon’s work speaks to the original format of a fairy tale–grotesque and slightly hostile. Fractured, oozing eggs and peering, smoldering eyes, bones littered about, stiletto platform boots, flowers, fruit, inscrutable oozes. Some creatures are distinctly feral in their fantasticism. Others are a more anthropomorphized goblinesque: narrowed gazes above chic sunglasses, coquettish and slightly smirking, as if in possession of a private joke. A cosmic joke? A quiet joke about you, the voyeur? Both seem feasible. This world engages through peeking out and peeking in, leaving behind a tantalizing and just-inaccessible contact.
Friends and collaborators of several years, both artists’ work consistently explore voyeurism and exhibitionism, sex, the grotesque, fragility, masking, delusion and the “real”, and extracting the latter from the former. Sheldon’s feral sets of eyes are matched in a photograph of Maybury’s, a submissive’s eyes dolefully peering through a surrounding overlay of revolting, Pepto-Bismol-pink opaque paint (“The Colour of My Skin”). The secrets of a non-linear dimension are bolstered and reflected in the brash, cerebral exploration of the privileged male psyche, and vice versa. Each body of work could stand on its own as confrontational and unsettling, witty and bizarre, but the symbiosis of the immensely different styles and mediums create the pleasure of this surreal little museum.' – Molly Edminster
For more info, click here.