Pervert or Detective?

A provocative conversation on the erotic, appropriation, power, and sex.

In Pervert or Detective?, artists Reba Maybury and Lucy McKenzie dissect power, desire, and subversion in a provocative conversation. Maybury, who integrates her work as a political dominatrix into her artistic practice, manipulates dynamics of control, compelling her male submissives to create art under her direction, only to claim it as her own. Through confession and humiliation, she dismantles notions of authorship, masculinity, and labor. McKenzie, known for her intricate trompe l’oeil paintings and conceptual installations, similarly blurs boundaries—between art and commerce, and authenticity and illusion. Her work challenges power structures and exposes the unstable nature of representation.

Maybury and McKenzie, through an expansive discussion with French art critic Marie Canet, interrogate the logic of seduction and domination, pushing against rigid binaries to probe the material erotic, appropriation, and transformation. With an introduction by curators Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen, an afterword by writer Susan Finlay, and extensive reading and viewing lists, Pervert or Detective? offers a compelling exchange between artists committed to unsettling the familiar and redefining artistic agency.

• Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen, Pervert or Detective as Practice
• Marie Canet Paris, November 11
• Conversation between Marie Canet, Reba Maybury, and Lucy McKenzie
• Susan Finlay, “Long Live the New Flesh”: Reba Maybury, Lucy McKenzie, the Medium, the Message, and a Great Variety of Surfaces
• Reading and Viewing List
• Glossary

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. She has published Dining with Humpty Dumpty (2017) and Faster than an Erection (2021). Themes of capital, labor, sexuality, female perversion, desire, banality, pleasure, bureaucracy as torture, and humiliation are essential themes to her practice. Maybury has exhibited at SIMIAN, Copenhagen; Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome; Luma Westbau, Zurich; HFKD, Holstebro, Denmark; Arcadia Missa, London; and Company Gallery, New York.

Lucy McKenzie is an artist whose work encompasses painting, installation, design, fiction, and curation. Her work as a painter is often preoccupied with outlying forms, including public murals and sculptures, schemes of decorative interiors, map making, and institutional display, among others. McKenzie has had solo exhibitions at Z33, Hasselt, BE; Meyer Kainer, Vienna; La Verrière, Brussels; Tate Liverpool, Liverpool; Galerie Daniel Buchholz, New York; Museum Brandhorst, Munich; Art Institute of Chicago; the Artist’s Institute, New York; and Museum Ludwig, Cologne, among others.