I Love When You Hop My Way, Brno 2023

Sculpture (wooden relief, plastic legs)

A wooden statue with plastic legs stands on the floor. It's not a toad yet, but it's no longer a frame. The title is a line from a popular TikTok song about a frog - Strawberry frog. The relief leaves a sense of mystery, whether it is a comic puzzle without words, a graphic expressed in wood or a frame for the void. On the other side is an embossed meme as flat as possible, referencing the same frogtok but from the therapeutic memes section. The point is that everything will be fine. By following the plot of a naive story in a similarly naive graphic design, one can understand the principle behind the diagonal reading of this wooden illustration. Such a principle is used in old icons of hagiographies of saints, martyrs (around the central image of the main character there are fragments that make up her story). In the story, the striped toad apparently decided to take a risky step - to jump and cross the highway. A small step for us is a big step for the toad. It flies across empty space and hits the back of the relief. At this point the frame becomes a portal between story and meme, between volumetric and surface, between material and digital. Could this be what Generation Z art looks like? At first glance, the drama about the toads looks like an environmental screed that asks a question about these amphibians that migrate in spring and inevitably die under cars. The work itself is based on a search for the toad as a symbol of LGBTQIA+ people and then a therapeutic element from "feel good memes." Their ability to live on land and in water, as well as their strong metamorphosis during life, duality and mutability, probably influenced the popularity of these animals in the aforementioned TikTok section.