Filmmaker John Waters and Maryland Public Television’s Artworks host Rhea Feikin have been unlikely friends for fifty years. One is an icon of elegance, the other the Pope of subversive bad taste. Their freewheeling conversation, filmed at the Baltimore Museum of Art and amidst the creative chaos of John Waters’ own art studio, touches on key works of Waters’ first visual arts retrospective titled Indecent Exposure.
But this conversation ventures much wider, exploring Waters’ creative process as filmmaker, writer, photographer and visual artist. It’s an intimate portrait of one of America’s most notoriously original creative minds.
Indecent Exposure is the first major retrospective of John Waters’ visual art in his hometown of Baltimore. Through more than 160 photographs, sculptures, and sound and video works made since the early 1990s, Waters’ renegade humor subverts mainstream expectations of representation and reveals the ways that mass media and celebrity embody cultural attitudes, moral codes, and shared tragedy.
Waters freely manipulates images of less-than sacred, low-brow references—Elizabeth Taylor’s hairstyles, Justin Bieber’s preening poses, his own self-portraits, and pictures of individuals brought into the limelight through his films—to entice viewers to connect to his astute and provocative observations about society.