THE BEASTS!

Joy Beasts was originally concieved for my thesis project closing out my studio specialist degree at UoFT. A collection of hand-stitched stuffed animals which I featured in boxes, archived with my own sorting system, and left open for viewers to interact with. While this initially started with my thesis, all stuffed animals I make going forward will also be archived and boxed.

I've archived all of them digitally on Toyhouse. Click the link on the sidebar to see them! No signup required.

Sordid-Sort Beast

What does it mean for an archive to speak in riddles, sort by its own terms, and create order not by the context it exists in but by an arbitrary system it internalizes?

Sordid Sort-Beast is my exploration into nonsensical archiving. Sewn between my experiences as a youth enmeshed in internet culture, a childhood spent in children's hospitals, and a recent OCD diagnosis, I sought to playfully interact with a representation of how I process experiences. Each stuffed animal is hand-sewn with upcycled material and old shirts. They are sorted into a system of my own design, employing aesthetics cross-wired from the early 2000's internet and the quiet, well-kept libraries I grew up in.

The beasts are inspired by drawings I used to make in a certain genre of creature. Never humanoid, but never quite sensical - spindly limbs, bulbous bodies, gnashing teeth. I snuck them on restaurant napkins, carved them into school desks, drew them on my arms with sharpies. In my ordered obsession, they internalized themselves into my conceptual understanding of the world around me. School-beast, who hates the bright lights and doesn't mind sitting still for hours. Walk-beast, who's attentive to the sidewalk, always looking for something shiny. I have brought them here - boxed, sorted, categorized to the finest point - to examine self-labelization and participation in the nonsense archive of bureaucracy.

Fragmentation is the beast of order; a byproduct of enmeshment into the greater sum of a system. We stitch ourselves into whatever groups we feel most connected with - sports fans, working class, part-time artist, small-town homebody - as lacking a group within our cultural context leaves us awkwardly fragmented. Who are you without your definitions, labels, and rules? Can you exist without your routine? I don't think it's a bad thing at all if you can't. The point of divergence is who you allow to create your system. You, or the ones in power?

This archive of beasts is self-fulfilling. Everything has its due place, and no beast is left unnamed. Ordered chaos, a quiet break in bureaucracy that indulges in itself for what it unashamedly is; weird.