monster farm

Curators

Charles Ryan Becker

Something Different

Artists

Cae

Ana María Chamucero

Charlotte Miles

Xavier Laurent Leopold

Benjamin Tong

Ed Vince

Lily Yuyang Wei

Hongru Zhang

“The monstrous body is pure culture. A construct and a projection, the monster exists only to be read: the monstrum is etymologically ‘that which reveals,’ ‘that which warns,’ a glyph that seeks a hierophant… so the monster is dangerous, a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions” (Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Culture).

Farms have animals, DUH! Who tried to convince us that this was a brilliant revelation?

Farms have plants, animals, goners, grandparents, edges, borders, rebellions, potential, lasting impact, space to realize truths, and a whole other plethora of related, unimportant things. Point is, remember what’s underneath. Under that layer of straw protecting the growth from pesky pests, preying predators, and hawk-like birds…there IS something sinister!

Characters, bodies, beings exist here. These creatures and plants are raised to be razed, commodified upon birth, and shipped away never to be seen again.

The farm is a site for family, supposed peace, nurturement, unlike the metropolitan city. Here space is reserved for growth, not rest. The city, in which each centimeter is valued as an exponentially rising stock, lacks such space. The farm is a place for production, the creation of exports, whose products are made to sustain elsewhere. An economy working for an external locale. Nature into city to make city like nature. The violence of the harvest coincides with the parasitic paradigm that borders the existence of humanity.

The monster is that which is other, that which is different, that which is feared. The monster is rooted in, and is produced only by, the culture from which it stems.

Thus, the farm and the monster are situated in this category of content producers feeding the masses, and those whose role exists due to the masses’ desire to be considered as societies’ center.

The monster is a mirror image to the way in which people interact with and treat the land. The producers are punished, yet those who enjoy the spoils of the labor are left unscathed. The monster is the result of societies drivels. It attacks those who are complicit in the creation of the systems which suppress them.

Quiet and peaceful, with seemingly nothing wrong, the monster is here, alive and well, in the corner, poised to expose itself at a moment’s notice.