Doll House 1999 Group Exhibition

The Doll House (1999)

Curator: Mark Laliberte
Location: Artcite Inc (Windsor, ON, Canada)

Statement: The exhibition examined the doll as both art object and socio-historic communicator, presenting a selection of works which address issues of identity, gender and body politics, and high art/low culture.

Artists have frequently utilized the doll as "cultural communicator" (i.e., Bellmer, Dali, Keinholz, Marisol) but it has often been part of a larger 20th century practice of using ready-mades in gallery settings. In contemporary practice, the doll is featured in the works of Paul McCarthy, Jake + Dinos Chapman, Mike Kelly, Laurie Simmons, Diana Thorneycroft, Sarah Lucas, Tony Oursler and countless others. In a sense, the doll has become a recognized conceptual artifact. It is an art-language unto itself with a myriad of formal and conceptual nuances.

The five artists included in The Doll House are all women, and they all work with the doll as an art object in individual ways. Despite a seeming similarity in materials (cloth, plastic, porcelain etc.) their relationship to the dolls is curiously varied. These artists transform traditional craft materials into highly charged, personal expressions. Because of the familiar nature of the form, dolls have a great potential to elicit a complex response with their viewers. This exhibition, in turn, has the ability to speak to a broad range of individuals, and will have a powerful impact on any viewer, despite their artistic or cultural background.

Things to read:
• Of Intimate Knowing essay by John Marriott
• Exoskeleton essay by Mark Laliberte
• Exhibition review: ( The Windsor Star )
• Catalogue reviews: ( Broken Pencil ) ( Splendidzine ) ( Metro Times )

Participating Artists:

MAGDALEN CELESTINO (Canada), originally from Windsor, is a Toronto-based artist with an active exhibition record, currently represented by Susan Hobbs Gallery. Her recent group exhibitions include 'Making Strange' presented at the Art Gallery of Ontario. She is a founding member of Republic, a Toronto-based artists' collective. Celestino creates black rubber dolls and skins (referred to as 'Pupa' which describes the dormant state of an insect's metamorphosis, and is also Latin for 'doll') that have been described as diminutive, androgynous and somewhat endearing in nature. Her works visually describe a kind of "psychological anxiety". A selection of her pupae works were presented in this exhibition.

Artist Statement: "Proud Flesh" is part of a series of installations called "Love Cascade" that spring from a love and fear of Nature. Physically obsessive and sensual, these things are borne of the body.This piece, comprises several black rubber latex "pupas" arranged as a "vesica piscis". "Pupa" refers in Latin, to a girl, doll, or puppet. It also refers to an insect in the cocoon stage. The name "Proud Flesh" refers to an abnormal growth of flesh around a healing wound. A legacy of blood, this work invokes Nature's twilight carnivalesque and pulses with merry perversity. These dolls wander lost, beseeching yet curiously detached. They call to the senses, to be touched and sniffed. Mutated, corrected then vivified with sutures and gushing red, they bear the traces of ritual passage. This is the realm of the mutant, the malformed, a monster's house both beautiful and terrible. In configuration, they are the accessories to a spell. Animal-headed deities, voodoo dolls, effigies and genetic experiments conspire in these skins. That which is hidden is yet to be revealed, like the peacefully oblivious worm in its cocoon, awaiting the coming glory. Nature convulses, the skin's shed, and infinity gasps.

DAME DARCY (USA) is a strange pop-girl from New York's alternative arts scene. Besides Meat Cake, her subversive "little grrrl" comics (published by Fantagraphics Books), she has been involved in numerous film projects, and is currently working on her own off-kilter children's TV show. At first glance, Darcy's works seem to exist within a traditional framework but further examination reveal an underlying subversion. Each clay doll is handmade and adorned with real human hair and each possesses a "pretty" painted face but in dim light, a glowing skeletal system is revealed.

Biography: Dame Darcy won a scholarship to the San Francisco Art Institute in 1989. She majored in film and studied animation under Larry Jordan. She self-published the first issue of her comic book Meat Cake the same year. She worked doing freelance illustration and cartoon work for Bay-area magazines, newspaper and underground zines. She began her career as a film actress in independent San Francisco area films, with directors such as George Kuchar. She also began her performance career by playing the banjo and other instruments in the band Caroliner Rainbow. In 1991 Meat Cake was signed to the largest independent comic book publisher in the US., Fantagraphics Books. Dame Darcy moved to Rhode Island after touring with the Suckdog performance troupe in 1992. That summer she starred in her first independent film, directed by Scott Hamrah. In 1993 she moved to New York City where she currently lives. Meat Cake has been continually published by Fantagraphics and has grown an international fan base of approximately 10,000 people. She continues to work doing freelance illustration, animation and design work. Her illustration work and hand made dolls have been exhibited and sold in galleries nation wide. Since 1996 she has produced and hosts "Turn of the Century", a public access show in collaboration with Blessed Elysium Productions, featuring films and animation work by herself and other artists. She performs in the band Planet Filly and as a solo act. She has gone on to star in a number of independent films.

FRANCOISE DUVIVIER (France) is a collage artist with a curious passion for dolls. She is best known for the often violent imagery in her collages, which have been collected into a book Dive/Duvivier: Works (a limited edition book released by Italy's Minus Habens Press). Duvivier's dolls are handmade, eerie, ritualistic and precious. Typically her dolls appear aged, with shriveled skin and tortured faces. They are nevertheless lovingly dressed in strange clothes of mourning, recalling past days in a simpler world, a world where superstition was still a thing of power. A collection of nine of Duvivier's dolls were presented, chosen from amongst dozens of completed works.

The Devotional Art of Francoise Duvivier (from SENSORIA FROM CENSORIUM Magazine): "Francoise Duvivier...devotes her considerable talents to crafting skillful and disarming works of art. A prolific collage artist and former small-press publisher of the impressive magazine METRO RIQUET, Francoise also crafts exquisite hand-made dolls. Each doll is imbued with a touching, at times disquieting humanity, fashioned with subtly and photographed by Francoise with a tender, candid bleakness that reveals the talents of a complex and sophisticated artist. "I remember my first doll I made myself when I was a child & shy; I was far away from home in the Big Garden. It was a creature made of a bottle cork, and two tree branches and a piece of fabric, and it was my first friend.""

CATHERINE HEARD (Canada) is an internationally recognized Toronto artist, and a founding member of the prolific Nethermind collective (1993 - 1996). She has used the image of the doll as it relates to both gender and medicine; her dolls are often presented with severe birth defects, and are almost never androgynous in nature. Rather, they seem to all possess a capacity for life as once-living, sexual beings. Heard's conceptual approach to dollmaking is representative of much of the work in this group show. She states that in her work "the doll becomes a disagreeable object, one of revulsion and of horrified fascination." Heard's exhibitions include: Naked State, The Power Plant, Toronto, (1994); Inhabited, Tenement Musum (Red Dive Collective) New York (1997); Dialogue, The Power Plant, Toronto and Kunstforeningen, Copenhagen (1997; Anatomical Permutations, Festival Internacional Cervantino XXVI, Guanajuato, Mexico, Centro Nacional de las Artes, Mexico City (1999); Gathering Shades, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, (2002); Mask and Metamorphosis, Art Gallery of Hamilton, (2003); and Effigies, Cambridge Galleries, (2003).

Catherine Heard is represented by Edward Day Gallery, Toronto.

An installation-based presentation of her sculptural dollworks was included in this exhibition.

MELISSA MAZAR (Canada) is an emerging artist from Guelph who lived and worked in Windsor in the late 90's. Melissa has been a participant in lectures on contemporary printmaking and was a visiting artist at both Clemson University in South Carolina and Queen's University in Kingston. Her work has also been the subject of a film, "In Mary Jane's Room", which won a jury citation at the Festival Mondial du Cinema de Court Metrage in Belgium. Recent exhibitions include an installation at the Detroit Artists Market in Detroit, and at Ohio University Gallery in Athens. Consistently bizarre, yet ultimately retaining a child-like quality, Mazar's dolls reveal a childhood gone wrong. A recent collection of her dolls were presented in this show.

Artist Statement : The dolls I have been making recently, are metaphors for the anorexic girl body. In Unbearable Weight, Susan Bordo explains the idea of the "two wills" in the anorexic: "one the servant of the flesh, the other the spirit" (403). Bordo suggests that flesh/body is a base matter associated with abject materials such as menstruation, sexuality, smell and bodily functions. Whereas thinness is associated with purity, and spirituality, a triumph against the flesh that is seen as a positive sign of control. My dolls operate within these boundaries of control/chaos, femininity/bestiality, spirit/flesh.I choose dolls because of their already loaded history, their stereotypical association with girl culture. For example, their feminine passivity and idealized appearance prepare girls for the social and physical limitations of traditional female roles. Both the doll and the anorexic are distorted images, controlled and unthreatening because they submit to dominant culture's idea of beauty.The doll also represents a perpetual girlhood, a kind of extended infancy which is imitated by starvation because it avoids inevitable womanhood by disrupting the normal growth process of the pubescent girl by delaying menstruation. My dolls are also monstrous and unclean. They represent the body which is feared and threatening and out of control: She is the "devouring insatiable female...the dangerous aggressive [adult] woman," whom the anorexic girl fears becoming (403). My dolls are symbols of female decay, both spiritual and physical. They are sad rather than angry. They are horror rather than whimsy.

Bordo, Susan, "Unbearable Weight" in Women, Knowledge and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy, Garry, Ann and Marily Pearsall Eds, Routledge: 1996.

		MAGDALEN CELESTINO (Canada), originally from Windsor, is a Toronto-based artist with an active exhibition record, currently represented by Susan Hobbs Gallery. Her recent group exhibitions include 'Making Strange' presented at the Art Gallery of Ontario. She is a founding member of Republic, a Toronto-based artists' collective. Celestino creates black rubber dolls and skins (referred to as 'Pupa' which describes the dormant state of an insect's metamorphosis, and is also Latin for 'doll') that have been described as diminutive, androgynous and somewhat endearing in nature. Her works visually describe a kind of "psychological anxiety". A selection of her pupae works were presented in this exhibition. Artist Statement: "Proud Flesh" is part of a series of installations called "Love Cascade" that spring from a love and fear of Nature. Physically obsessive and sensual, these things are borne of the body.This piece, comprises several black rubber latex "pupas" arranged as a "vesica piscis". "Pupa" refers in Latin, to a girl, doll, or puppet. It also refers to an insect in the cocoon stage. The name "Proud Flesh" refers to an abnormal growth of flesh around a healing wound. A legacy of blood, this work invokes Nature's twilight carnivalesque and pulses with merry perversity. These dolls wander lost, beseeching yet curiously detached. They call to the senses, to be touched and sniffed. Mutated, corrected then vivified with sutures and gushing red, they bear the traces of ritual passage. This is the realm of the mutant, the malformed, a monster's house both beautiful and terrible. In configuration, they are the accessories to a spell. Animal-headed deities, voodoo dolls, effigies and genetic experiments conspire in these skins. That which is hidden is yet to be revealed, like the peacefully oblivious worm in its cocoon, awaiting the coming glory. Nature convulses, the skin's shed, and infinity gasps.


		DAME DARCY (USA) is a strange pop-girl from New York's alternative arts scene. Besides Meat Cake, her subversive "little grrrl" comics (published by Fantagraphics Books), she has been involved in numerous film projects, and is currently working on her own off-kilter children's TV show. At first glance, Darcy's works seem to exist within a traditional framework but further examination reveal an underlying subversion. Each clay doll is handmade and adorned with real human hair and each possesses a "pretty" painted face but in dim light, a glowing skeletal system is revealed. Biography: Dame Darcy won a scholarship to the San Francisco Art Institute in 1989. She majored in film and studied animation under Larry Jordan. She self-published the first issue of her comic book Meat Cake the same year. She worked doing freelance illustration and cartoon work for Bay-area magazines, newspaper and underground zines. She began her career as a film actress in independent San Francisco area films, with directors such as George Kuchar. She also began her performance career by playing the banjo and other instruments in the band Caroliner Rainbow. In 1991 Meat Cake was signed to the largest independent comic book publisher in the US., Fantagraphics Books. Dame Darcy moved to Rhode Island after touring with the Suckdog performance troupe in 1992. That summer she starred in her first independent film, directed by Scott Hamrah. In 1993 she moved to New York City where she currently lives. Meat Cake has been continually published by Fantagraphics and has grown an international fan base of approximately 10,000 people. She continues to work doing freelance illustration, animation and design work. Her illustration work and hand made dolls have been exhibited and sold in galleries nation wide. Since 1996 she has produced and hosts "Turn of the Century", a public access show in collaboration with Blessed Elysium Productions, featuring films and animation work by herself and other artists. She performs in the band Planet Filly and as a solo act. She has gone on to star in a number of independent films.


		FRANCOISE DUVIVIER (France) is a collage artist with a curious passion for dolls. She is best known for the often violent imagery in her collages, which have been collected into a book Dive/Duvivier: Works (a limited edition book released by Italy's Minus Habens Press). Duvivier's dolls are handmade, eerie, ritualistic and precious. Typically her dolls appear aged, with shriveled skin and tortured faces. They are nevertheless lovingly dressed in strange clothes of mourning, recalling past days in a simpler world, a world where superstition was still a thing of power. A collection of nine of Duvivier's dolls were presented, chosen from amongst dozens of completed works. The Devotional Art of Francoise Duvivier (from SENSORIA FROM CENSORIUM Magazine): "Francoise Duvivier...devotes her considerable talents to crafting skillful and disarming works of art. A prolific collage artist and former small-press publisher of the impressive magazine METRO RIQUET, Francoise also crafts exquisite hand-made dolls. Each doll is imbued with a touching, at times disquieting humanity, fashioned with subtly and photographed by Francoise with a tender, candid bleakness that reveals the talents of a complex and sophisticated artist. "I remember my first doll I made myself when I was a child & shy; I was far away from home in the Big Garden. It was a creature made of a bottle cork, and two tree branches and a piece of fabric, and it was my first friend.""


		CATHERINE HEARD (Canada) is an internationally recognized Toronto artist, and a founding member of the prolific Nethermind collective (1993 - 1996). She has used the image of the doll as it relates to both gender and medicine; her dolls are often presented with severe birth defects, and are almost never androgynous in nature. Rather, they seem to all possess a capacity for life as once-living, sexual beings. Heard's conceptual approach to dollmaking is representative of much of the work in this group show. She states that in her work "the doll becomes a disagreeable object, one of revulsion and of horrified fascination." Heard's exhibitions include: Naked State, The Power Plant, Toronto, (1994); Inhabited, Tenement Musum (Red Dive Collective) New York (1997); Dialogue, The Power Plant, Toronto and Kunstforeningen, Copenhagen (1997; Anatomical Permutations, Festival Internacional Cervantino XXVI, Guanajuato, Mexico, Centro Nacional de las Artes, Mexico City (1999); Gathering Shades, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, (2002); Mask and Metamorphosis, Art Gallery of Hamilton, (2003); and Effigies, Cambridge Galleries, (2003). Catherine Heard is represented by Edward Day Gallery, Toronto. An installation-based presentation of her sculptural dollworks was included in this exhibition.

		MELISSA MAZAR (Canada) is an emerging artist from Guelph who lived and worked in Windsor in the late 90's. Melissa has been a participant in lectures on contemporary printmaking and was a visiting artist at both Clemson University in South Carolina and Queen's University in Kingston. Her work has also been the subject of a film, "In Mary Jane's Room", which won a jury citation at the Festival Mondial du Cinema de Court Metrage in Belgium. Recent exhibitions include an installation at the Detroit Artists Market in Detroit, and at Ohio University Gallery in Athens. Consistently bizarre, yet ultimately retaining a child-like quality, Mazar's dolls reveal a childhood gone wrong. A recent collection of her dolls were presented in this show. Artist Statement : The dolls I have been making recently, are metaphors for the anorexic girl body. In Unbearable Weight, Susan Bordo explains the idea of the "two wills" in the anorexic: "one the servant of the flesh, the other the spirit" (403). Bordo suggests that flesh/body is a base matter associated with abject materials such as menstruation, sexuality, smell and bodily functions. Whereas thinness is associated with purity, and spirituality, a triumph against the flesh that is seen as a positive sign of control. My dolls operate within these boundaries of control/chaos, femininity/bestiality, spirit/flesh.I choose dolls because of their already loaded history, their stereotypical association with girl culture. For example, their feminine passivity and idealized appearance prepare girls for the social and physical limitations of traditional female roles. Both the doll and the anorexic are distorted images, controlled and unthreatening because they submit to dominant culture's idea of beauty.The doll also represents a perpetual girlhood, a kind of extended infancy which is imitated by starvation because it avoids inevitable womanhood by disrupting the normal growth process of the pubescent girl by delaying menstruation. My dolls are also monstrous and unclean. They represent the body which is feared and threatening and out of control: She is the "devouring insatiable female...the dangerous aggressive [adult] woman," whom the anorexic girl fears becoming (403). My dolls are symbols of female decay, both spiritual and physical. They are sad rather than angry. They are horror rather than whimsy. `Bordo, Susan, "Unbearable Weight" in Women, Knowledge and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy, Garry, Ann and Marily Pearsall Eds, Routledge: 1996.`