Tyler Shields’ Lipstick in Mouth (2024, Archival Pigment Print) is a bold exploration of beauty, desire, and destruction, rendered through the artist’s unmistakable visual intensity. The image presents a close-up of a mouth painted in vivid crimson, the lipstick itself lodged between gleaming white teeth, cracked and crumbling under the pressure of the bite. The composition is both seductive and violent, transforming an everyday cosmetic object into a metaphor for tension, control, and the fragility of allure.

By isolating the mouth and amplifying its details, Shields heightens the sensory charge of the photograph. The glossy red lips gleam with perfection, while the shattered lipstick disrupts the polished veneer, exposing the duality between surface glamour and underlying rupture. The work resonates with themes central to Shields’ practice: power, consumption, and the volatility of desire.

Lipstick in Mouth reimagines a familiar object of fashion as a symbol of resistance and excess. It is both a celebration of beauty and a critique of its impermanence, capturing in one striking frame the precarious balance between seduction and destruction.

Chromogenic print
18 x 18 inches