I’ve been playing around with octopi, squids, and octopus-human creatures
for awhile now and I knew that’s what I would do with my chaboo as soon as
I thought about participating in the project. The interest stems both from
the amazingly odd structure  of the creature (read: fun to draw) and how
that relates to the perception of strange/not-strange.

The octopus-human creation first came about when I was given the
assignment to somehow depict an “other”. My first idea for that project
was “monsters”. I wanted the monsters to be labeled as such, but I also
wanted them to appear completely normal at first glance. In many of the
drawings I did for that assignment, the tentacles appear almost hidden to
suggest that what makes someone a monster isn’t always obvious, or
immediately known. I wanted this to suggest a questioning of our own
normalcy. Is a tentacle really a stranger body part than a set of toes? I
wanted the work to provoke thought about why we designate some things as
odd and foreign, and others as normal and acceptable.

We’re all monsters, you know?

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 10th, 2009 at 12:28 pm and is filed under Project Chaboo, artists. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.