The Feral Child Has No Use For Art
Caroline Snow and Bozidar Brazda
April 7 – May 7, 2011
PRESS RELEASE:
We lived like this for months, roaming the mountainside, snarling, drooling, fucking the dirt, stoned on bitter peyote that grew by the fistful. Our hair tangled. Our teeth black. Self- orphaned. Blind by choice. Veiled snipers. Armed with a rusty old Kalashnikov (no bullets) that we used to smash and dig and maim, and to scare off the village priest — in his shredded robes and wooden rosary — who had doggedly hunted us like the wild gamine that we were. We existed on a steady diet of swan. Never bathing. Dry, cracked mud falling from us like ancient Greek amphora. A single word between us did not pass. We dared not desecrate our tongues with the melody of some distant childhood lullaby. We remained mute. The silence of our day shattered only by the distant, metallic clang of civilization, rattling our ears and bashing in our brains, until all we saw and tasted was blood.
For their first collaborative exhibition, artists Caroline Snow and Bozidar Brazda take a page from Snow's zine Feral Child and use it to conceive of a vaguely anthropomorphic sculpture and sound work. The sculpture is assembled from stacks of 2 X 4 studs and plywood and suggests both makeshift shelter and proto-Juddian sarcophagus. A soundtrack — appropriated from a youtube video of a child mimicking a dog's bark— illuminates our instinctive need to convert nature into art. Both the shelter/tomb, and sound work, propose the art viewing experience, at least in part, as a means by which to circumvent life (television being a common example of this same phenomenon) in favor of a safer, cleaner proxy. And suggest that art is ultimately designed to shield humanity from the dirt of its wild roots. And by default, from its collective inner feral child.
Caroline Snow (b. 1982) Lives and works in New York
Bozidar Brazda (b. 1972) Lives and works in New York
