The Doll House

The Doll House

“The Doll House” catalogue was produced to accompany a group exhibition of the same name which was presented earlier in 1999 at Windsor’s Artcite Inc. Examining “the doll as both art object and socio-historic communicator”, the two essays by Mark Laliberté and John Marriott raise interesting questions about the presentation and utility of dolls in the gallery space. While they talk less about the actual work in the show, which seemed to showcase dolls stripped of “fashion”, of consumer-driven residues, they raise questions about gender, history, and voodoo which the works certainly seem to employ. In “Exoskeleton”, Laliberte talks about performance in the gallery space, “interaction” with dolls appropriately situated within a sophisticated adult play space: “…The work challenges common notions of beauty and fantasy normally endorsed by the pop doll; instead it talks of skin disease and starvation, it plays at being visceral and morbid, and almost without trying, it shocks. People pull away from these dolls because they are so foreign…” Indeed, all types of dolls are (or used to be) foreign to the gallery space, as they have been used in recent years in all forms and in similar contexts to no end. Albeit far more alluring than morbid, there’s Barbie, Sleeping Beauty, Victorian Porcelain Dolls, even a one-of-a-kind Cher Doll. I am reminded, rather, more of the foreignness of my youth, distanced from it not only by geography and culture, but time – that distance is a morbid evolutionary thought process. The catalogue is a neatly produced temporal reminder of the work of the five women artists – Dame Darcy, Catherine Heard, Melissa Mazar, Magdalen Celestino, Francoise Duvivier – and also a smart curatorial exhibition. It raises a myriad of useful questions about beauty and its flip side. (PVP)

catalogue, 1999, 32 pgs (8 full colour), $10 + $2 shipping, Mark Laliberte, Curator, Artcite Inc., 109 University Ave. W., Windsor, ON, N9A 5P4

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