Coastal Signs is pleased to present Someday My Prince Will Come, a solo exhibition of new work by Timothy Webby.

Webby’s recent work has focused on the physical and metaphorical potential of the photographic medium. Drawing on images associated with powerful, identity-forming myths—including museological displays, scenes from rural Aotearoa New Zealand, and material drawn from a personal family archive—his practice examines the ways in which images and genres shape our understanding of self and how that might be undone and re-thought. Through processes of hand-colouring and abstraction Webby pushes photography toward forms of visual expression more commonly associated with painting, transforming familiar subjects into sites of desire and (dis)identification.

Someday My Prince Will Come presents a new collection of images taken at Disneyland. Installed in loose constellations across the gallery, the works accumulate like fragments of a larger narrative, oscillating between documents of personal reflection and a mood board for collective mythology in crisis.

In Someday My Prince Will Come Webby attends to both Disneyland’s spectacle and to its margins and moments of ambiguity. In Webby’s images the theme park’s theatrical environments take on a shadowy, uncanny quality; a tunnel lined in gemstones disappears into a black abyss, abandoned strollers gather beneath looming facades, wands poke through inky darkness. The hand-worked surfaces feature dense blacks and crude washes of dye, sometimes all-over and at other times highlighting a sensual details such as a slash of red across a lip or a dripping yellow rose. In Webby’s exhibition familiar symbols and scenes of enchantment retain their affective power only to be re-cast in a vampy, gothic pantomime.

While Disney stories have long perpetuated idealised visions of romance and belonging, Someday My Prince Will Come approaches these narratives obliquely. Disneyland emerges, in Webby’s hands, as a repository of potent symbols and signs, and a stage where, with some artificial lighting and a sugar rush, images can be continuously consumed, recycled, rehearsed and reimagined for narratives that far exceed the original script.