Melissa Paget
Restless

Melissa Paget is a multi-disciplinary artist from Vancouver, BC, Canada whose 2022 visual practice is heavily informed by her vast collection of rare 1970s and 1980s underground erotic culture magazines and catalogs. For this series, Paget utilizes metalwork and textiles to construct large-scale quilt-like ‘canvases’ that mirror the 70s and 80s manner of cut-and-paste advertising in the back sections of the magazines that directly influence the work and also provide carefully edited imagery. Paget’s eye for combining raw vintage sexual and related images creates further narratives of the body as a commodity but within a historically specialized environment thanks to her propensity for collecting tangible paper material and curation of the imagery. The result of the presented works gives the viewer an intensely directed view into the world of vintage sex magazine publishing via her ongoing feel for mixed media art, adding even more to the empire she’s created which also includes sound work (under the project title MASS MARRIAGE), video and obsessive illustration.

Photo by Natalia Melikova
© Artist, Spas Setun and Devyatnadtsat’, Moscow