Daniel Harding (the school bully back in grade six) used to light his farts in the library. I caught him, on several occasions, by the L to M aisle with his pants down and his brown eye squinting. I often think back to those days and recall how ridiculous and ingenious he was all at once.
It takes a brave 12 year old to put a lit match near his own asshole. Even back then I admired him, so it’s no wonder that since then I’ve had a love of the ridiculous – not just any type of ridiculous, but clever ridiculous. The kind of silliness that provokes a little thought or a little awe. This is precisely why I love illustration/design duo Kozyndan.
Kozy (one half of the pair who are here with their exhibition Bunnies…Heart…Chewy) quietly admits, “Our work is a little goofy.” Dan agrees, “It revolves around the sillier parts of our personality. Obviously there are other parts to us too, but so far our work is more about the absurd.”
If you’re not familiar with the absurdity and goofiness of Kozyndan, think Bunnyfish flying through a Melbourne Alley, or a Tokyo train station filled with old men in school dresses or a city populated by ice-cream people. “We love showing things like that, like big cities that when you look closely at there are little things you don’t notice straight away. Things are not quite as they seem.”
Behind the humour lies a sense that Kozyndan have quite a love/hate relationship with the modern world that booms around them. “We both love technology and the wonders of the work of mankind,” says Dan. “We have a love of nature and seeing all that destroyed in the name of erecting these big megalopolises is sad at the same time.”
Kozyndan have been collaborating for five years and married for four so it’s fair to say the pair have stumbled across a winning formula - one that I am Coola-coloured of. “We knew the very first time we collaborated, because it felt so right,” recalls Dan. “It was immediate and we went away afterwards and said we have to do more of this and we’ve been doing it ever since.”
Not for the fame and glory either, mainly for art’s sake and partly because Dan says Kozy “can’t wake early enough to hold down a real job.” See what I mean? Ridiculous, but utterly genius too.
Bunnies…Heart…Chewy is on at Outré Gallery in both Melbourne and Sydney. Visit
www.outregallery.com for details.