Becca Guzzo is a visual artist based in New York City. She received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2020 and her BFA from the University of Delaware in 2016. She is currently the Feminist Incubator Fellow at Project for Empty Space in Newark, NJ.
She was born and raised in New Jersey. Her work currently focuses on the rights and autonomy of animals, critiquing the unhealthy relationship between people and wild animals through sculpture, photography, collage, and illustration. Her work is meant to have a comedic element to make an upsetting, difficult topic more palatable for an audience while still being able to make a point about conservation. Labor intensive processes and clean visual aesthetics are an imperative part of her practice to put her objects in a state of preciousness or fragility, parallel to that of the conservation of real animals.
All inquiries contact: rebeccaguzzo@rocketmail.com
Statememt
My most recent project explores the negative effects advancing social media culture has had on the welfare of animals trapped in the tourism and entertainment industries. My practice also engages the ways in which this generation's deep flaws are shaped by advancing technology, news media and social media culture.
My sculptural process is heavily influenced by prop-making techniques speaking to the idea that many wild animals have been reduced to props for human consumption. They exist in liminal space -- somewhere between a stuffed animal and a living being, their existence themselves is an objectification. I eliminate the head in my works by sticking it inside of mundane objects (a wall and television) to create a dark state of being that’s almost sad and circus-like. The subject is robbed of their identity, majesty and dignity, forced into unnatural existences. I photograph these sculptures with my own models, an essential part of my depiction, to recreate eccentric versions of wildlife tourism photos I often come across online. The photos are meant to be provocative yet confusing; unnatural and very uncomfortable to look at.
A large part of my work has to do with experimentation in the physical construction. Layering is heavily considered throughout all of my practice. My work is a hybridization of elements which I construct myself and objects that already exist, looking to artists like Robert Rauschenburg, Marcel Duchamp and Dustin Yellin. Bright colors and references to SMPTE color bars are imperative, reflective of the pop art movement and its influence from pop culture and mass media.
In light of the recent events of COVID-19 I have thought deeply about pushing the context of my work further than just the tourism industry - my point is that no good comes from our close interactions with wild animals, period. And perhaps we can use our current situation to understand how imprisoned animals must feel. Many of us feel trapped, claustrophobic and even helpless being stuck at home, and at the same time we are hardly confined to chains or cages.
