Tricky, Sexy, Sodomy or The Case of The Attention-Seeking Whores by Maria Jeona as Cumerlier Cuntiteh, The Spy Detective
November 12- December 04, 2011
Main Gallery
Maria Jeona presents her first major solo show with Manila Contemporary entitled Tricky, Sexy, Sodomy or The Case of The Attention-Seeking Whores by Maria Jeona as Cumerlier Cuntiteh, The Spy Detective; a raw and confrontational sexual acid trip that reveals her fascination with the physical act of sex itself. Graduating from UP this year, she is one of the newest voices to emerge in the Manila art scene and has already extensively exhibited her work in numerous group shows and was nominated for the 2011 Ateneo Awards. As part of her process, Maria Jeona extracts a mixture of kitsch and excessive curiosities from her obsessively produced scrapbooks that explore the intimate and more taboo aspects of personal identity. Moving between innocence and abjection, she purposefully creates double meaning and contradiction in her sexually explicit works that become metaphors for the world (and art world) around her.
Compulsively documenting herself since she was a teenager, the autobiographical nature of Maria Jeona’s work is layered with both illusion and self-reflection. With detective like urgency, she researches and reconfigures unusual sexual practices, which are then combined with a Lolita-esque awareness of fetish and innocence. By using neon colours, glitter and stickers, she lures audiences into a seemingly naive fantasy world that then unravels into a hallucinogenic journey of sensual experience, debasement and personal discovery. As both narrator and subject, Maria Jeona also appears throughout these images as the playful provocateur examining her life whilst simultaneously challenging issues around the female body politic and sexuality.
For the exhibition, the Main Gallery will turn into a pyramid shaped bordello/dungeon filled with intimate confessions and abject pleasure. The pyramid is an iconic symbol and one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The monumental exoticism of this distant icon, however, is subverted via Maria Jeona’s kitsch execution to become a Las Vegas style parody or make believe land extracted from child’s play and fantasy. Upon entrance, viewers encounter a youthful world of sexual lust and experimentation, passion and humour. These sexually conceptual jokes, as termed by the artist, reveal the decadence of sex and the curiosities of a young woman exploring her own sexual interests. Unapologetically revealing, shameless and tasteless, she provokes viewers to let go of their inhibitions in order to enjoy the visceral and unconventional side of sex through a constellation of painting, cut outs, scrapbooks, drawings and installation. Combining elements of the perverse with a keen sense of figuration and tight composition, she presents a nymphatic vision that is at once disorientating and insightful.
