FORMAT

Film, 5 mins

ARTIST

Finn Rabbitt Dove

INFO

No dialogue

Closed Captioned Audio

Vendor Beast is a short film that explores cross species relationships, nostalgia and loss, in a world of increasingly manufactured landscapes. Nature programmes full of wonder and spectacle offer an idealised version of the world. Faced with the realities of ecological crisis and rampant capitalism, we are left with nostalgia for a world that never existed. Footage of children, almost in flight, with captive polar bears becomes a dystopian analogy of the 1982 animation, The Snowman. Synonymous with climate change campaigns, the polar bear has become a celebrity, presented behind glass like snacks in a vending machine,for us to live out our fantasies; can’t we see that this snowman has already melted?

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Finn Rabbitt Dove lives and works in Glasgow having graduated from The Glasgow School of Art in 2019. Finn is an Artist and Filmmaker, whose work reflects an abiding interest in the interaction of human and nonhuman animals in a world of increasingly manufactured landscapes. Finn’s films have been selected for various international film festivals and exhibitions including; Other Ways of Watching Together, MAMA Rotterdam (2020), FILE Sao Paulo (2020), Bow Arts, Visions in the Nunnery (2020), 34th. Stuttgarter Filmwinter (2021) and Hungry Eyes Festival (2021). Recently Finn was awarded the Fringe Review’s Hidden Gem Award (2021) collaborating with Anne Rabbitt. Finn is currently working with Artist/Writer Toby Mills on a video game – Salmonopticon 2025 – in which the fish are becoming domesticated in worrying ways. Originally part of the collaborative virtual world, Wretched Light Industry, for Serving the People (2021). Having won the Special Prize in the Architectural Association’s Animalesque City Competition, Finn will be a part of the ARCH+, COHABITATION exhibition, which takes place in Berlin, June (2021).