AMERICAN BIGFOOT IS MONKEY SUIT
AMERICAN BIGFOOT IS MONKEY SUIT
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Occasionally, evidence comes in to destroy the flights of our imagination. Based on a BBC headline in which an alleged Bigfoot was discovered to be actually just a man in a monkey suit, this series from Brandon Juhasz (1976, USA) reacts with bold and humorous cynicism to a world that has a tenuous relationship with reality, at best. Juhasz explains that he started the series around the time that he turned 30, and was thinking about life and expectations. The discovery of the game bigfoot became emblematic of his feelings at the time. He says: ”Here is this amazing mythical rare animal people search for and believe in, but in the end it turns out to be just a monkey suit.”
Turning his disillusionment towards the medium of photography, Juhasz based his work in photography’s power to shape worldviews and produce desire, despite it being fundamentally a media that he refers to as having ”not real” proporties. He began to experiment with transforming images into objects and then re-photographing them. The finished works create a multi-faceted vision of photography as well as reality itself, with the awkwardly three-dimensional images taking on a king of Futurist texture with Postmodern irony.
Bizarrely vibrant and playfully caustic, Juhasz’s series points to one of the landmarks on the timeline of photography: the point when we started to ask, does the world of images has to be flat?
