Montreal-based Mikel Marton has spent his short career exploring issues of mythology, religion, male sexuality and beauty, on both sides of the camera - a self-portrait is on the left. His photos are dreamlike constructions, all parts of larger narratives that range from the very real, to the very surreal. He’s a man on a mission to make ordinary men gods, and fantasy reality. Or maybe the other way around.

Weston: Hey Mikel. Let’s start at the start - give us a little history.

Mikel: My family is from Hungary. My mother from Budapest and my father from Soporon. I was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, but I’m still one-hundred percent Hungarian blood. I was raised in the small town (and band-namesake) ‘Chilliwack’. It smelled of animal feed, rotting crops of brussel sprouts and Christianity. It was very oppressive, so I moved to Vancouver as soon as I graduated, and spent a few years there until I found it too superficial and vapid for me. That’s when I left my loved ones, and family and moved to Montreal, which was a year and a half ago. I do visit Vancouver, yearly.

W: On to the present. What did you do today?

M: Well… my day has just started. I am a bit hungover this afternoon, as I drank too much shit beer at this karaoke place that I always get kicked out of for starting fights with the DJ. French/English bullshit.

W: Where does the name from your website “toxicboy” come from?

M: A character from a book of morbid nursery rhymes, by Tim Burton, whom I was fond of in grade 9. I haven’t been able to escape the name, since my work has become associated with it. How will my fans know where to look? It still sounds appropriate, as long as you don’t associate it with Britney Spears (which I definitely don’t).

W: Some of your idealized, homoerotic, mythological, fantastic subject matter, your constructed tableaux, and highly manipulated imagemaking process, immediately brings to mind the work of Pierre & Gilles and James Bidgood. What do you think you share with them?

M: Other than being delusional, sexually repressed, ass-obsessed nerds? I myself, definitely don’t work in reality, and I guess we all have a fixation with over-idolizing the beauty of the male body. All of our imagery seems to be inspired by the adulation of gods, saints and beasts in the Bible and mythology. I’ve been obsessed with mythology for as long as I could read. I guess you could say, I am into the act of deification because I fuse dreams into reality - I make men into gods. I guess I could have also answered, “I’m a pisces”.

W: What I find interesting about your body of work is that some of your images are highly stylized, controlled, and manipulated, while on the other hand, much of it is more naturalistic.

M: Like I said, I fuse dreams into reality. If you aren’t satisfied with reality, you always can invent it! I’m terribly impulsive and feel it is all the same approach really. I let my intuition tell me what is needed where. It’s quite challenging to play out your imagination through such a realistic medium, that’s what I enjoy so much. Oh yes, and the naked boys.

W: I think your work that exists somewhere in the middle, stylistically - much of the work we selected for the article - is the most interesting and the most powerful. It’s like a peek into a mythological world, without getting lost in it.

M: I like to create an image that’s sexually stimulating, but doesn’t overpower the other senses at play. I am creating a visual, emotional and sexual experience with my photographs. It’s like an experiment, if you took the loin cloth, or underwear, or tastefully placed hand away in your mind’s eye, what would you see? It fulfills many curiosities and then builds the hunger for more.

W: You sent us a sneak peak of a new series your working on - a reluctant looking clown with a balloon tied around his cock. Would you like to explain that?

M: Well, I think it certainly explains itself.

W: When does art become pornography for you?

M: Taste in porn is as subjective as taste in art. Porn makes sexuality look ugly without trying to be ironic. I do think of it as art, though: the gratuitous devices are very visual, and audible - it stimulates us, and draws us into a new reality - into the primitive perversions of our mind. I think the difference between art and pornography is all in the intention.

W: Why do the subjects in nearly all of your photographs confront the viewer so directly.

M: I’m sexually aggressive.

W: You also do a lot of self-portraits. Is it pure exhibitionism or are you giving yourself something that you can’t get from your models?

M: It’s a type of exhibitionism. I can’t express it any other way. It’s projected creativity and sexuality times 1000. It’s the third-dimension of my personality that I don’t flaunt in real life. It lets you look into the eye of the storm that is my creative sexuality.

W: You’re super hot, and totally hung. Does that make it easer to attract models?

M: Yes. Does that make me manipulative?

W: Maybe, but I doubt anyone minds. Do you build your stories around the models you find, or find models to fit the stories? What’s your process?

M: It really depends. I extract everything from my imagination and storyboard the concept before I photograph a model. I select models who actually GET my work, so once I’ve selected someone and can place them with the type of aesthetic I have probably previously dreamed up, then we are ready to shoot. Some people have such a strong aesthetic of their own that they inspire a series. If I’m confident about the chemistry between the model and myself, I like to freestyle to see what we can create.

W: You also have done a few stories about women. How do you approach female subject matter differently from male?

M: I like females more than I like males. Males just give me boners, and I can relate to male sexuality because I am a male. I like to photograph women vulnerable and powerful, displaying the things I find most beautiful about the female character.

W: Tell us about the new wave burlesque troupe you founded.

M: Bad Taste Burlesque is a burlesque troupe that pushes the ideas of what ‘burlesque’ is. Our motives are to shock, arouse, offend, please, titillate, and most of all, entertain! All in the spirit of bad taste, of course. We debuted our show Heavy Petting Zoo, I did one act, where I was an aggressive equestrian jockey boy, in my classic get-up: riding hat, crop, tights, boots, who had to teach the naughty pony boy a lesson. In turn he taught me a lesson when he ripped off my tights, and had me on my hands and knees as a show horse showing off my bare flank, then he rode me. In turn, I liked it, ripped off his saddle exposing his bare back, and rode my bare ass across his back, all the way to his face with a tongue-in-the-ass finale. We are planning a religious themed show this summer.

W: It seems natural for you to turn to video - any interest?

M: Very much. Please buy me video equipment, you won’t be sorry you did [laughs].

W: What’s your soundtrack while you’re working?

M: Lately, the old dudes: David Bowie, Gary Numan, Iggy Pop and Kate Bush (if she counts as an old dude).

W: I think she does. So, being an exhibitionist, where else do you like to showoff?

M: Well, when I am in Vancouver I practically live naked at Wreck Beach. It has to be the most beautiful beach in Canada, that you have to walk ten minutes through a breathtaking rain forest to get to. It isn’t perverse, and it’s always packed with the beautiful shapes of everyone’s nude forms. People walk around selling things from beer, to margaritas, to weed and exotic specialty foods. It’s pretty amazing, and it’s on the aquamarine Pacific Ocean.

I also like to swim naked anywhere, break into public pools, the beach, anywhere. Other then that, public sex and recording myself having sex are HUGE turn-ons. Ha, look at you finishing the interview with a dirty question…

all images ©Mikel Marton

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