The Hollywood Animal is the inaugural digital publication from Celebritas, a collaboration between artists Misael Oquendo and Alex Calamos. Created in 2017 after the duo relocated from Chicago to Los Angeles, the work emerged from a shared sense of alienation and intrigue toward the city’s art world and its uneasy intimacy with the entertainment industry. It reflects a fascination with the cultural absurdities of Hollywood, media spectacle, and the treatment of animals as both icons and laborers.

Designed as a visual and textual mediation, the publication features stylized Wikipedia-inspired profiles of celebrity animals—Air Bud, Lassie, Bubbles, Mister Ed—collaged and illustrated to highlight the surreal pathos of their constructed personas. These quasi-biographical entries are paired with a long-form critical essay, “On the Hollywood Animal,” which interrogates how cinema renders animals legible through training, projection, and anthropomorphism.

Blending theory, satire, and visual culture, The Hollywood Animal asks: What does it mean to make the animal speak? And what does it reveal when humans, in turn, perform animality? The result is a digital document that operates as both archival parody and poetic critique—a speculative taxonomy of Hollywood’s nonhuman stars.

-Celebritas