Keith Mayerson

So this is me playing Velázquez in Las Meninas in my superillegal sublet in SoHo, where I make art and live with my boyfriend, Andrew, our dogs Julian and Rosa, and Rimbaud, our canary. The painting I'm working on is a Beatles diptych, part of the series you see hung everywhere entitled Hamlet 1999. My apartment acts as the accordion-fold template for the work, which is also a salon-style narrative based on a screenplay I wrote, a kind of homoerotic sci-fi version of the original Hamlet, with a rotating cast of players appropriated from film stills, art history, and self-invented iconographic abstractions. It is to be "read" like a storyboard, a stained-glass window, or a comic, albeit in an open-ended way. Keanu / Rimbaud / Olivier / Dave from 2001 / Mike Piazza/ Spiderman is Hamlet, River Phoenix is Horatio, Mary is Gertrude, Christ/ John Lennon/James Dean is the Ghost, and so on

Claudius is W./Jimmy Stewart/patriarchy in general. Hopefully, each painting stands on its own, and I've been lucky enough to have parts of it leak out here and there, but I'm planning to show the whole enchilada soon. On the TV is my favorite scene from one of my favorite movies, Dune: the visionary sequence, when he looks at the moon and says, "I can see it! I can see it!" as he sees for the first time how it all fits together.