Submit to Love's current artist-in-residence is Steven Wright, who found fame turning his house in Dulwich, south London, into a living museum of Outsider Art. He called it his “House of Dreams”, so it was interesting to see him bring his dreamworld to Submit to Love.
One of his first projects was to get members making masks. The temptation to draw parallels between masks and dreams is strong. It could be said that both are multi-layered confessions, and Steven agreed that masks are more often about revealing than concealing.
Our members took first-base inspiration from a serious book about Mexican masks, but roamed freely with the subject thereafter. So it wouldn't be a good idea to read too much into these masks. Some of them are of real people (Michael Jackson), some are just for fun. Some are self portraits. AD's image of herself depicts a wild-headed woman with her tongue sticking out. It's a remarkable likeness, both physical and metaphorical, of the AD I know. Studio manager Michelle modelled herself on an evil crone with sunken eyes and a hooked nose. As I said, don't read too much into these things. Errol Drysdale did the mask of a lion. That's a good character fit, too.
One of the fascinating things these masks all have in common is that inside them, their essence, their soul, is one day: Tuesday, October 16, 2018. This is because they all started as scrunched-up pages from that day's copy of the Metro newspaper, on top of which is layer upon layer of Modrock.
The front-page headline in the Metro on that Tuesday was “MEXIT!” followed by a story about how Prince Harry's wife, Meghan, will be enduring the pain of childbirth on the same day the UK is scheduled to leave the EU. Good luck with that, thought Sam Jevon as she turned this story into the outsized nose of a grinning idiot.
Other stories that day included one about Katya from Strictly Come Dancing trying to repair her marriage after a slip of the tongue with a long-haired comedian called Seann. There was something about Universal Credit not only being a pathway to misery for tens of thousands, especially women, but a total waste of billions for the taxpayer. But my favourite story was an interview with the artist Finn Stone (aka, the Mad Hatter), whose north-London house looks like it just came out of Steven Wright's toilet.
It is weirdly comforting to think that the Metro newspaper's worldly wisdom is embedded in these creations. More so that each of them carries an identical tabloid voodoo and yet look so vastly different. It's both enlivening and creepy in one take.
I still can't resist mentioning that huge pink nose to Sam Jevon at every opportunity. She giggles coquettishly, but I'm pretty sure she's wishing I’d just shut up and piss off.
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