The Screen
Maritime Adventures & Toys in the AtticJohn Paul Evans
26 March - 14 May 2022
Maritime Adventures
“what adventure shall we have today Peter?”…”let’s have a maritime adventure J.P”
As a child I was fascinated with the animation character ‘Mr. Benn’. He was a suited gentleman who would enter a magical costume shop and have adventures in his chosen attire. Looking back as an adult, this seemed to connect with a gay subculture in which men would often dress up to enact their fantasies.
The role of the sailor has particular resonance through the centuries for same sex attraction from the stories of Herman Melville through to Jean Genet, the mystique of this traveler of the high seas has great potency.
Dressing up and role play allow us to explore worlds we thought we had left behind in childhood, a time where anything seemed possible, a time of pretence and make believe.
Excerpt from John Paul Evans' Maritime Adventures.
Toys in the Attic
Toys in the attic is a series of photographs in which my husband Peter and I perform ideas about home, memory, alienation, belonging and otherness.
The loft space is used as a metaphor for the unconscious and the early socialisation process we encounter in a patriarchal culture.
Baudelaire suggested that the child’s capacity to indulge its imagination is evidence of an artistic sensibility “the toy is the child’s earliest initiation into art, or rather its first concrete example of art; and when maturity intervenes, the most rarefied example will not satisfy his mind with the same enthusiasm, nor the same fervent conviction”1
1. The Philosophy of Toys – Charles Baudelaire
An excerpt from Toys in the Attic by John Paul Evans.
