Monster & The Nocturnal Pollinators

Monster Chetwynd’s multifarious practice – spanning interactive performances, film, collage, painting, and installation – interweaves elements of folk spectacle, popular culture, and surrealistic cinema. Chetwynd is known for per anarchistic bric-a-brac style performance pieces featuring handmade costumes, props, and sets. Describing per work as ‘impatiently made’, ze often re-uses cheap materials that are easy to process to create costumes and scenery that are easy to deploy and adapt, while incorporating eclectic cultural references – from Bertolt Brecht to Bugsy Malone. At the core of Chetwynd’s practice is an emphasis on the work’s collective development.

This participatory impulse behind Chetwynd’s performances is at the core of per performance and film production and, as such, traverses traditional boundaries between the mediums ze employs within per practice. Informed by notions of play and the importance of playful imagination, typical binaries become shaken and flipped – ‘out of this world’ becomes ‘into this world’ and imagination might be closer to reality than it appears. Beyond the idea of absurdism, Chetwynd’s characters, sets, props and costumes embody an ever-changing image of our present and futures. Quick snippets might become permanent states, and loose views may become fixed viewpoints. 

Most recently, Chetwynd’s oeuvre has diverted into a new body of work informed by and developed through earlier panel paintings. Chetwynd has described the affordable medium as ‘very rewarding’ and discovered that the ‘spontaneity and gesture involved with the material lends itself to performance’. Ze draws from images, videos, and memories of previous performances for the subject of watercolor works, re-thinking and re-working them to alter the composition. Positioned alongside the large experimental paintings in costumes constructed from cardboard, glue, paint, paper, and cloth, Chetwynd bridges the gap between two aspects of practice – painting and performance – to form a singular, otherworldly performance piece. Throughout per career, Chetwynd has notably changed per forename several times, with previous names including Spartacus (2006-2013), Marvin Gaye (2013-2018), and Monster (2018 to present). Of these transitions, ze has said that ‘to choose one’s name, for me, is like casting a spell, uttering an incantation. It‘s a very economical way to bring about change.’