During lockdown, I began making collages using vintage nudie magazines like Playboy and PlayMen. What captivated me wasn’t the glossy bodies splayed across glossy pages, but the curious clutter that surrounded them. The mise-en-scène of desire. A taxidermy rug, a plastic water pistol, a Coca-Cola cup balanced on a dusty television showing a Donald Duck cartoon. These were the things that caught my eye: not the nipple, not the skin, but artefacts of yearning. The banal machinery of pleasure. What happens when you zoom in, crop out the skin, remove the panting urgency of sex? What’s left is oddly tender. A new kind of image. A still life of materiality, humor, humanity, and melancholy. En Regalia—a title evoking royal adornment, display, symbols of status and spectacle—brings the eye to what’s usually ignored: the world around the body.
During lockdown, I began making collages using vintage nudie magazines like Playboy and PlayMen. What captivated me wasn’t the glossy bodies splayed across glossy pages, but the curious clutter that surrounded them. The mise-en-scène of desire. A taxidermy rug, a plastic water pistol, a Coca-Cola cup balanced on a dusty television showing a Donald Duck cartoon. These were the things that caught my eye: not the nipple, not the skin, but artefacts of yearning. The banal machinery of pleasure. What happens when you zoom in, crop out the skin, remove the panting urgency of sex? What’s left is oddly tender. A new kind of image. A still life of materiality, humor, humanity, and melancholy. En Regalia—a title evoking royal adornment, display, symbols of status and spectacle—brings the eye to what’s usually ignored: the world around the body.