'The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.'  — Antonio Gramsci

Gramsci announced a time of monsters nearly 100 years ago, and the new world yet unborn weighs down the present as it lurches on, gravid in its late term. 

We live entangled in systems which feel impossible to escape from, longing for times characterized by change- the beginning of things or their end.  A zombie apocalypse is the dark mirror of our Lost Eden- something different than this fixed order, this structured sameness.

A time of Monsters is an in-between time, of a world in flux, convulsing.  Joshua Pelletier populates this world with sculptures of bog people, and border creatures. Monsters, yes, but also of hopeful hybrids. Chimeras. A world peopled by an ever-shifting proteus. An unfixed form it moves and in moving shows us how to navigate.  This has always been the role of the grotesque. 

       The art of empire is inviolable, timeless, ageless and eternal. Afraid of change, this art abhors alterity. The grotesque allows an alternative to the power of empire, a fecund subterranean space of vitality in flux. The empire was built over this strange alchemical muck but excavate just a few layers and you will wander into a sewer warren of the grotesque.

The word “grotesque” was derived from pittura grotteschi (“cave pictures”), a term coined in Rome during the Renaissance. The term referred to a newly discovered style of ancient fresco, unearthed during the 15th century excavation of Nero’s Domus Aurea. To witness these freshly discovered paintings, buried in earth since the time of Emperor Titus, artists were lowered down into the cave, “le grotte,” by a rope. The images these artists found had a bit of a subconscious “cave” energy about them, filled as they were with shifting and changing forms, decadent excess and wild id. 

In common usage, “grotesque” has come to mean revolting or horrific. However, there are some nuances which are necessarily understood when the term is used in this art historical context. Of these, two are of principal interest to Pelletier: that it is a process of a figure undergoing a transformation, and that the figure in question elicits empathy from the viewer, arousing a mixture of revulsion and pity.

Objects of our present are in dialogue with the past, bound by proximity.  But the past is inscrutable.  It is erased by time. Time, simply put, creates grotesque. Time is everywhere.  These dialogues are constant.

Working primarily carving stone, Pelletier presents the grotesque as a crucial, and potentially universal, anthropological device that societies use to conceptualize alterity and change. Through his unconventional process of allowing the materials to dictate to the artist what form they should take; Pelletier allows his pieces to be as weird as they want to be.  He sculpts mole people, emerging from catacombs, disused tunnels, the “beneath” of empire.

Our hope? A poisoned Eden is not poisoned for poison people.