Using discarded stuffed toys and local thrift shops finds, artist Ross Bonfanti manipulates childhood objects to produce sculptures in concrete. Each piece becomes an original artwork from a mass-produced object. Bonfanti links his own lifelong emotional experiences to his work while exploring themes commenting on commodity fetishism in our capitalist economy and the disposableness of consumer pop culture. By juxtaposing these materials he creates an arresting tension between the expectation of softness and the reality of hardness, between the fleeting and the permanent, between the memories of childhood and the stresses of adulthood. They are touched with both humour and pathos.Ross Bonfanti, a graduate of Ontario College of Art and Design, was born in 1969, Toronto, Canada. His work is held in many private collections across Canada, USA, Europe, Australia and Asia, notably Hirshhorn Museum Smithsonian Institute (Washington DC, USA) The Drake Hotel (Toronto, Canada) 21 C Museum Hotels (Louisville, Kentucky, USA), Boca Raton Museum of Art (Boca Raton, Florida, USA), Canada Council for the Arts (ArtBank, Ottawa, Canada). His work represented by galleries in London (England), New York City and Miami (USA), Montreal and Toronto (Canada).