Bex Massey amalgamates simulacra and allegory to investigate notions of ‘worth’ via motifs and tones extracted from their childhood.  Massey’s works and exhibitions engage the codes and history of queer culture, along with markers of selfhood and Northern identity.  Their paintings offer a nod to the post digital split screen and they discuss ideals of ‘value’ via the relationships between the minimal conflations. 

These oil on canvas pairings encourage allusion to female bodies, building an underlying sexual tension imbued by the artist into quotidian objects. Compositionally the couplet mirror each other and their visceral epicentres form a visual echo.  This is further extended by an implied auditory element as the scenes contain the potential of noise, whether it is the moment a cat yawns or fizzy drink explodes – force in one image is released in its partner.  

These climactically coupled, female laden, tension imbued depictions are a nod to societies persistently binary notions of gender and therein the habitual reminder that outside the male gaze, Female + Female = Incorrect.   Masseys recent fertility journey with their partner has brought this into sharp focus, and this process is alluded to in the titles of canvas which are named (in the series ‘My Deuce, My Double’) after the sperm donors they have considered and (in the series ‘The Agalma’) after Grecian fertility Gods they have looked to. This additional layer encourages the work to be viewed via a reproductive lens. 

Represented by Seventeen