Barrett Barrera Projects, a St. Louis-based consulting company specializing in the arts, is returning to Miami Art Week to present Darwinian Voodoo’s Apex Predator Collection by Mariana Fantich and Dominic Young of Fantich & Young as one of the art installations the company will unveil during Art Basel this coming December.
Darwinian Voodoo | Apex Predator
The Apex Predator collection, which was inspired by the 2008 financial crisis, features male and female ceremonial attire that are customized with human hair, bones and eyes and accompanied with footwear, perfume and accessories that are laden with thousands of teeth. The conceptual pop-up exhibition is designed to simulate a luxury lifestyle boutique in which the collection of objects merge the creative disciplines of fine art, design and fashion.
Luxury consumer goods augmented with ritualistic items such as teeth, bones, and hair represent the banking community and its escape from criminal prosecution. The financiers thus become the titular Apex Predator – topping the food chain, facing no real threat and possessing perhaps a touch of the supernatural.
Designed for “the discerning client with the taste for power and exclusivity,” the Apex Predator collection includes shoes, masks, two-piece ensembles, perfume and other meticulously embellished accessories. All items in this luxury retail exhibition will be sold as limited-edition art sculpture (not meant to be worn as fashion items) with prices ranging from $2,000 for the “killer shoes” – a pair of black stilettos featuring soles made of teeth – to $45,000 for the “Female and Male Superhumans.”
ALPHA MALE, sculpture, 2014, 108 x 142 x 74 cm (SOLD)
Materials: vintage RM2 Adel Rootstein mannequin Male hero R28, Michael Dion Penguins ice hockey goalie mask, dentures, human hair, phlanages anatomical bones, glass eyes, shoes, suit and cricket gloves.
ALPHA FEMALE, sculpture, 2014, 104 x 141 x 132 cm (SOLD)
Materials: Vintage RD29 Adel Rootstein Mannequin LS9 Classics Simone, ice hockey mask, teeth dentures, human hair, shoes, suit and gloves.
If the free-market economy is indeed a forum where only the strongest survive, and our urban habitats are a brutal jungle, Fantich & Young’s Darwinian Voodoo seems to perfectly address the needs of an exclusive clientele who reside at the very top of our society’s food chain.
More pieces from the collection are shown below:
The products above and more are available to purchase from the artist’s online store (if not yet sold) here.
Prints are available of the pieces as well. See those here
About Fantich & Young:
Mariana Fantich, born and raised in the Ukraine, is an artist and digital media specialist and Dominic Young is an English musician and artist. Since 2008 they have collaborated under the name Fantich & Young and are currently based in London’s East End.
The duo juxtaposes and manipulates symbolic ready-made objects – including Saville Row suits and Jimmy Choo shoes – in order to parallel both natural and social evolution, calling into question the theory of natural selection with nods to ceremonial ritual and the supernatural – a concept they term Darwinian Voodoo. Their Apex Predator project, is an outgrowth of Darwinian Voodoo.
Darwinian Voodoo
images and information courtesy of Fantich & Young and Barrett Barrera
