At Ca’Buccari, a renovated space near the Giardini della Biennale in Venice, Reba Maybury and Lucy McKenzie’s collaborative exhibition Pervert or Detective? interrogates the space between voyeurism and investigation, desire and critique. It is accompanied by a publication edited by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen. The interview, moderated by Marie Canet, serves as a documentation of their uncensored intellectual exchange. The exhibition space is divided into three former storage units–the back walls of two are covered with McKenzie’s trompe l’oeil murals of domestic illusions, while Maybury’s (aka her submissives’) drawings are presented under transparent frames and construct a theoretical framework, revisiting canon events. The middle room contains works by both artists, creating a tension between McKenzie’s illusion and Maybury’s usurpation of male desire.
Maybury challenges conventional power relations through her work as a dominatrix by commanding male submissives to produce artworks under her guidance. Mistress Rebecca deliberately disrupts the standard pleasure-money exchange, using men’s pleasure for her own empowerment. ‘I am bored by the idea that the power of the dominatrix is reduced to the latex and boots that she wears.’ She compels them to create rather than consume and inverts the typical economy of sex work, where male pleasure is usually centred and female labour is shamed, undervalued, stigmatised and romanticised. The works of her submissives (Wormy is one of the most obedient) often engage with questions of masculinity, power, politics and basically anything she says. ‘I don’t want to be a used woman. I want to be the user,’ says Maybury, transforming these men into a medium for her artistic practice.
Used Man, a drawing made by a sub featuring an installation from Maybury’s exhibition The Happy Man (2024) at Company Gallery, showcases clothes left on the floor by one of the submissives, taken on command. The assemblage operates as a proxy for the client’s typically anonymous figure, reducing men’s identities to the fabric they leave behind. It centres on what remains absent rather than present, where the submissive’s efforts only achieve visibility through the curatorial intervention of their Mistress. By preserving only the material traces of submission, Maybury extends the reach of her dominance. The humiliation persists long after the initial encounter, refusing the theatrical expectations typically associated with the aesthetics of sex work.
Francis Bacon, German, Junior Art Adviser (II) (2024) is a paint-by-number impressionist painting simulacrum, named after one of Maybury’s submissives. He is a young man, who came to their first meeting offering Maybury a catalogue of Francis Bacon’s works from a Royal Academy show. Maybury sees paint-by-number paintings as a metaphor for sex work and tourism, which have a parallel in the experience of intimacy without any commitment. ‘Just like the paint-by-number kit gives the experience of art without being an artist, a sex worker gives a façade of a relationship, and tourism gives a façade of penetrating the culture.’
McKenzie is known for her use of trompe l’oeil technique. ‘One of the reasons I work with trompe l’oeil is because the body reacts to illusion. Suspension of belief is momentarily putting yourself in the hands of others.’ Loss of visual independence creates a parallel to power dynamics in other contexts, making the viewer vulnerable in front of the artwork–a vulnerability McKenzie herself experienced when male artists appropriated her early pornographic modelling work with Richard Kern. ‘... pornography supplies a coldness and flatness, and trompe l’oeil the inverse: seduction and vertigo,’ she explains in the interview. Where pornography often reduces bodies to consumable objects, McKenzie’s trompe l’oeil manipulates the dynamics of looking, creating works that initially appear to offer direct access to the subject but ultimately reveal themselves as constructed fantasies.
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The trompe l’oeil of domestic scenery makes the exhibition space less sanitised, creating an illusion of trust, an environment that feels protective. McKenzie’s materialist approach means she can ‘get overwhelmed with feelings about a certain place,’ requiring her to use architectural elements as emotional stand-ins. Her fascination with figures like Adolf Loos reveals an awareness of how domestic space has been weaponised in history–he ‘used design rhetoric to place himself as superior to women, non-whites, Jews, etc.’ Yet she also draws inspiration from Modernist women whose ‘living spaces were also their studios and showplaces,’ artists like Eileen Grey and Madeleine Vionnet, who transformed their homes from cages to spaces for work and creativity.
Vita, Funder Bakke, July 2024 (2025) depicts Reba's daughter sitting in a high chair, an empty plate in front and a spoon in hand. The domestic setting of the canvas evokes associations of innocence, care, and nurturing, and contrasts sharply with other works. The baby figure feels like a disruption within the framework of Pervert or Detective?, forcing the viewer to question the very act of looking. Unlike many art objects that submit to gaze, this baby appears to stare back, reversing the power dynamic. This is particularly uncomfortable in an exhibition context where artists investigate how bodies get consumed and commodified. The technical perfection of the trompe l’oeil makes the illusion irresistible, highlighting how easily we can be manipulated into consuming images without considering the consequences.
The male fantasy of a woman being close to a childlike creature: hairless, innocent, a virgin is juxtaposed in the interview with being a slut: ‘... one of the most embarrassing things a woman can be is grotesque, a mess, dirty.’ McKenzie describes how she once farted during а modelling job, disrupting the carefully constructed fantasy that demanded she remain a sanitised object of desire. A Madonna / Whore dichotomy exposes how, in patriarchal systems, female sexuality relies on two extremes: childlike purity and sexual availability.
Lucy in Blue Suit, 1997 and Lucy with Head in Toilet, 1997 (both 2024-2025) are submissive’s drawings of photographs from the period when McKenzie worked with Richard Kern, a cult figure from the 1980s No Wave New York scene. In They Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time (2018), McKenzie writes about her pornographic modelling experience. At Kern’s request, she signed a paper relinquishing all control over how he uses her pictures. McKenzie considered this ‘abdication of control as mental material for making art with,’ finding it more interesting than simply re-presenting the visuals as readymade content. Later, some of the photographs were appropriated by male artists, treating them as ‘authentic raw material’ that could be shaped into art with the addition of some creative authority. These appropriators failed to understand that ‘the ambiguity of my position is a conscious construction I myself instigated,’ instead falling for what McKenzie calls ‘the age-old pornographic trope that equates a schoolgirl’s uniform with innocence and availability.’ These artists bought into Kern’s product–transgression–without realising they were purchasing a ‘ready-meal’ rather than fresh ingredients. This experience of being treated as raw material fundamentally shaped McKenzie’s artistic practice, making appropriation and the politics of representation personally significant.
This exhibition carries a tension that refuses to release you. Maybury states, ‘Making work for me is pleasurable’, and McKenzie adds, ‘For me too, even if it’s physically painful, isolating and tedious.’ Being horny to make your art is a big privilege–both artists understand that not many people treat pleasure as something subjective, therefore limiting their access to it as a creative force. Pervert or Detective? demonstrates how reclaiming pleasure as methodology first requires dismantling the systems that police who gets to experience it and under what conditions.
(1) Lucy McKenzie, “They steal your watch and then tell you the time,” Texte zur Kunst (March 2018). https://lucymckenzie.com/media/documents/2018_They_Steal_Your_Watch_and_Then_Tell_ You_the_Time.pdf
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Pervert or Detective? is curated by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen, a collaboration between Ca'Buccari, no place press and gta exhibitions, ETH Zurich.
Reba Maybury is an artist, writer and dominatrix sometimes working under the name Mistress Rebecca. Her work explores the tension between her perceived strength as an object of fantasy and how through the reality of sex work she attempts to turn this power into something tangible. Much of her art practice is physically created by her submissive's through her direction as a way to further the complicated imbalances of labour under sex work, gender and entitlement and an attempt to empower her further than the mens desires, leaving her with more than just a payment from them. Her first novella is named ‘Dining with Humpty Dumpty’ (2017) and more recently she published 'Faster than an erection' (2021). Themes of capital, labour, sexuality, female perversion, desire, banality, pleasure, bureaucracy as torture and humiliation are essential themes to her practice.
Lucy McKenzie (1977, Glasgow) lives and works in Brussels. She studied at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design in Dundee and at the Van Der Kelen-Logelain Institute in Brussels, where she learned traditional painting techniques such as trompe-l’œil, wood, and marble imitation. These techniques are - with their labour intensity and alignment of value with skill - innately conservative idioms. McKenzie exploits this formal conservativism to create a tense relationship between form and content as she explores topics such as ideology and sexuality. She uses the same methods of deconstruction in forms as diverse as design, fiction writing and window display. In addition, McKenzie is also active as a curator. Since 2011, she has been working with designer Beca Lipscombe on the interdisciplinary fashion label Atelier E.B, which merges fashion, art, and exhibition design. Their joint exhibition Passer-By was shown from 2018 to 2020, including at the Serpentine Gallery in London, Lafayette Anticipations in Paris, and the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow. McKenzie has had numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Museum Ludwig in Cologne, and MoMA in New York. Her retrospective Prime Suspect was presented in 2020/21 at the Museum Brandhorst in Munich and Tate Liverpool. Most recently, in 2024, the Z33 in Hasselt, Belgium dedicated a major solo exhibition to her.
Maria Blok is a writer based in London.
