Winter Elves – A History of Frogs

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Chase Biado
Winter Elves, 2022
Graphite, Colored Pencil, and Charcoal on Paper
12.0 × 9.0 in.
30.5 × 22.9 cm

A Hiﬆory of Frogs is an experiment in form—destabilized through play-logic to find new relationships between peoples and objects. The object conceptualized as evolving and fluid, hologram and hybrid… . AHOF is an investigation into the rehistorical object—the goblin baroque, the marsupial gothic. The frogs were right. We were never human. The Human was a proposition positioned between gods and frogs and it failed. AHOF posits the morph; a frog turns into a man, yes, but also the stages in between—the frog-man¹

Johann Kaspar Lavater (1772) Physiognomy

with vestigial ears and bulbous eyes. AHOF believes in the evolution of the self through the dissolution of the fixed narrative of selfhood. The chorus of frogs. Brekekekéx koáx koáx! Brekekekéx koáx koáx!²

FROGS off stage
Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax,
Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax!
We children of the fountain and the lake, let us wake,
Our full choir-shout, as the flutes are ringing out,
Our symphony of clear-voiced song.
The song we used to love in the Marshland up above,
In praise of Dionysus to produce,
Of Nysaean Dionysus, son of Zeus,
When the revel-tipsy throng, all crapulous and gay,
To our precinct reeled along on the holy Pitcher day,
Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax.

Aristophanes (405 B.C.E.) The Frogs