Artist Dean Hoy, now 25, must have been thinking about his childhood when during the pandemic he decided to take old teddy bears back into his hands, trying to give them a new life, a different meaning than they had when he was a child.
The artist began to fix some creased parts, to mess up others, burning them or adding thicker seams, more fur, pearls, scraps of lace, creating new puppets less harmless and tender but more disturbing. The works of the project “Bears Who Cares” have in fact grotesque aspects, perhaps not too reassuring if seen through the eyes of a child, but more impactful for the message they want to convey. Dean Hoy, taking puppets from charity stores, wants to make visible a theme that is often addressed but with which it is more difficult to come across in everyday life, such as the abandonment of animals. To do this, he needed a physical object, to touch and of which we could all recognize the feelings that it can transmit in its original state.
The meaning of animals is also in the way we take care of them, this is the concept behind Hoy’s works, in which he denounces the disinterest and selfishness of man, the affections with the timer, opposed to childhood as a moment of purity.
