Diana Cazacu is a 22-year-old multimedia artist working primarily with costuming. They were raised in Milledgeville, GA since the age of 4 and grew up within a mixture of Romanian and American culture. They enjoy exploring themes of animality and humanity, often combining the two in order to break down conceptions of what a human is and should be. Growing up, online communities gave them a place of belonging and shaped their artistic style. Realizing they were queer from a very young age, their art is charged with the emotions and politics of being queer and having queer loved ones in the American south.
Project Statement
Wolf Woman is a life-sized sculpture of a woman with the head of a wolf created to challenge western society’s traditional concept of womanhood. To compare someone to an animal is often a form of degradation to make them feel subhuman. On occasions when animality is used to elevate a human, it is used more often for men, as we see within ancient Egyptian sphinxes. On the other hand, women have often been considered subhuman compared to men, one of the clearest examples being the Greek maenad, which translates to “raving one”. The maenad parties with wild animals and is crazed with hedonism. Wolf Woman is a modern-day maenad who has claimed the authority of a sphinx, inspired by furry culture, rave culture, and the women I have admired throughout my life. The combination of ancient societies’ anthropomorphism with modern furry anthropomorphism highlights how she can be viewed as both an ancient concept and a modern girl. This sculpture is made up of painted plaster and paper-mache, topped with a foam-base fursuit head that obscures her head underneath. Her various details work to capture a modern-day rave queen with excessive body hair, skimpy clothing, and a snarling face. Here, she is not subhuman–she is in her element, powerful and captivating as both human and beast.
Artist Statement
For most of my early life, I felt a disconnect between who I wanted to be and who I was. I was always disciplined for “misbehaving”, and my lack of ability to fit in with boys or girls made me feel like some weird animal instead. Before I realized I was nonbinary, I would find a momentary familiarity in certain people I knew I wanted to be like. The older girl who taught me how to roller skate, the goth at summer camp who I complimented after two days of working up the courage, and others who sparked within me glimmers of love, hope, and a desire for something more in life. In college, I received the push towards independence I had desperately needed. I quickly found that when I am with the people I love and doing the things I love, I do not particularly care to be a boy or girl– I simply exist without those expectations. In my art, I explore and pick apart the nuances of gender by depicting figures who break and bend gendered expectations in various ways. I particularly enjoy making art of animalistic people, as I find that ferocious canine teeth pair wonderfully with lipstick. To put it bluntly, Wolf Woman is the culmination of my love for when women are fat, hairy, animalistic, and weird. I hope to inspire myself and others to allow our fun-loving, animalistic natures to overshadow an overwhelming pressure to fit in.
