Reba Maybury is an artist, writer and political dominatrix who sometimes works under the name Mistress Rebecca. As a dominatrix, Maybury aims to subvert and question Her submissives’ conceptions around power and authority, in regards to the dynamic of dominance, submission and transaction. One of the methods she employs consists in instructing the submissives to carry out labour for Her, and by putting their labour at the centre of Her artistic process she furthers Her power outside of the men’s fetish of her as a ‘strong woman’. In doing so, she also occupies a position of institutional critique, questioning the notion of authorship, as seen in Her Signature Paintings.
Day of Wrath is a video collaboration between Maybury and fellow artists and friends Sidsel Meineche Hansen and Joanne Robertson, commissioned as part of WITCH HUNT at Kunsthalle Charlottenborg (DK). The video reworks the opening of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1943 namesake film (which depicts the execution of a Danish witch) to Dies irae, a 13th-century melody used in the Mass for the Dead, which is played in reverse. The artists collaborated with musical artist Joanne Robertson, who improvised over the Gregorian Dies irae melody, played in reverse. Another source material of the video work is 12 Rules for Life, Jordan Peterson’s polemical book on the crisis of masculinity that became popular amongst male alt-right and incel (‘involuntary celibates’) communities online. Hansen and Maubury rewrote the 12 rules with illustrations executed by Maybury’s male submissives who lend their fantasies and drawing styles to the artists’ ideas.
Developing the ideas of the video, Maybury and Meineche Hansen created another 12 Rules for Life, a series of copper etching plates and prints.
