On The Body

Nabokov wrote Lolita and was called a genius. Araki made Mysterious Skin and was celebrated for his courage. Sally Mann photographed her own children in ways that made America deeply uneasy. In each of these forms, what ultimately protected the work was the same thing: a narrative distance and an authorial position that tells the audience how to feel and therefore lets them off the hook. The monster is named. The viewer is guided to the correct emotional exit.

Mead builds no such exit. He does not contextualize, does not reassure the viewer about his own intentions, or theirs. That absence of a moral safety net is precisely what makes his work unbearable to many.

Whether that discomfort is a provocation or a mirror may say more about the viewer than the canvas; discomfort, in art, is rarely accidental, and the question worth asking is not whether these paintings are difficult to look at. They are. The question is what that difficulty is made of: is it outrage, or is it recognition? And if it is recognition, what exactly are we recognizing?

What fascinates me about your work is the total absence of an escape route for the viewer. Authors like Nabokov in Lolita provide a moral compass or a structural distance that tells the audience how to feel. You don't build that exit. Why leave the viewer entirely alone in front of the canvas?

To be honest, it’s not deliberate or intentional on my part - though listening to you, maybe it should be! Nabokov had to deal with the specific time he was living in, which probably dictated a certain distance between the narrator and the piece of art. I wish I could claim I have an intellectual master plan, but I don't. My process is much more immediate : I just want to get a reaction, whether that means making people laugh or shocking them. I have no real program. If I tried to manufacture something calculated just to be "interesting" or palatable to an audience, nobody would give a shit about it.

Your palette is soft, almost tender, but the image lands like a fist. Is this fairy-tale aesthetic simply the most honest way for you to tell these stories?

Folktales and traditional fairy tales had a massive, foundational influence on how I learned to see and make art. It’s an honest language for me. I’m very drawn to comedy and the mechanics of stand-up comedians. The response to a great joke on stage has to be instantaneous. You plant a thought directly into the viewer's mind, and they process it at lightning speed - either they reject it completely, or they burstinto an explosive laugh. That’s the visceral, rapid-fire connection I look for. I want that immediate, unfiltered connection that bypasses the analytical brain.

Is there a difference for you between painting to provoke and painting to expose? Which impulse actually drives you?

I think it’s about provoking a deeper recognition. Those coarse and unappealing male figures in my paintings are a confrontation with the unvarnished reality of human desire. It’s about taking the vulnerability, the awkwardness and the dark corners of the mind and highlighting it. My depictions of the masculine gaze aren't flattering, but they are honest. It’s an invitation for the viewers to stop projecting monsters onto external headlines or distant media figures, and instead recognize that these complexities and shadows cross the minds of everyday people. We all carry these internal strangenesses, and my art simply brings them into the light.

There is an underground feel to that raw honesty. Is there a political edge to your practice?

I grew up loving underground comics like Robert Crumb, which absolutely shaped me. There is a political side to that scene, my scene. It’s a way of looking at the world without the usual polite filters, much like the satirical cartoons I’ve always loved.

A painting of yours was destroyed in 2004. Artists resigned from galleries in protest in 2008. That was before cancel culture had a name. Now it has an infrastructure. Does that make your work more necessary, or simply more exhausting?

If I made my art just to make people angry, I wouldn't think very highly of that kind of artist. But if the culture reacts with that level of anger on its own, it means you're touching a raw nerve. It’s fascinating that putting some lines and colors on a piece of paper can provoke someone to that extreme of a physical response. It means something is happening.

At the same time, people get obsessed with dark phenomena like the Epstein case because it confirms our worst ideas about our species. It taps into ancient fears, like the story of Bluebeard. In my paintings, the animals - which are always male - act as a sort of metaphor or satire for those human impulses. But I don't see my work as a commentary on wealthy power structures. Incredibly rich men can do horrible things because they have no financial restrictions, but poor men can do equally horrible things. Men are just capable of terrible violence.

Can an image be genuinely disturbing and genuinely necessary at the same time?

I don't really think in terms of my art being "necessary" or not. I don't have a grand moral lesson to give, and I'm certainly not here to lecture anyone. Back in the 80s punk period, it was very trendy to make books full of car crashes, murders and medical gore just to shock people. I always hated that and avoided it completely.

I don't feel I have any business telling other people how to think or how to feel about it. What I like isn't a political debate, it's what we call a frisson - that quick, physical reaction where unease and humor hit you at the exact same time.

The only true failure is total indifference - when people just walk right past the canvas without even looking at it. If they stop, look and react, it means the image bypassed their analytical filters and a genuine current passed from my brain to theirs. When they engage with that intensity, they create a continuity of my work.