installation views

Karen Justl
and The Ontario College of Art and Design
present
The Dolls in The Playground

a Masters Thesis Exhibition
Launch Projects Gallery
404 Adelaide St W.
June 10 – 12, 2010,
Opening: June 11th, 7pm-10pm

Rainer Maria Rilke laments that the one's fusion with the doll is a barren union that promises everything and delivers nothing,“dragged as companions into cots, abducted into the deep furrows of illnesses, appearing in dreams, entangled in the disasters of feverish nights -such is the nature of dolls”.

Gothic in contemporary art is more art-directed and atmospheric than neatly defined. It easily bleeds into related terminology, particularly the dreamscape of the uncanny, the filthy abject, the figurative domain of caricature or grotesquery, while retaining it’s original evocative power and resilient nature. It is also a nod to the many early forms and expressions of Gothic especially those put forward by the romantics of the late 18th and early 19th century in art, literature and film. Like those sinister romantics, my experiments in The Dolls in The Playground also rejects the rational and favours the supernatural, in order to spark the magic of the imagination. The Gothic underpinning this work has to do with the comedy of death, transgression, a mixing the irrational and scientific, the living and the dead, the Pagan and Christian, innocence and corruption. It is ugly in the face, a band of outsiders celebrating depression and antagonism. It is a grotesquery that greets one with a disembodied hand, a pail of hot oil suspended over the entranceway, the sound of laughing from behind the wall or under the floorboards or an unmoving small menacing figure in a labcoat with a hatchet.

The pretense of contemporary Gothic is used as a cloak worn by my experiments illustrating emotion through dolls, figurines and toys in a tableau vivant or living-theatre style exhibition. This work attempts to redefine the concept of the Gothic as it relates to the human forms that I am creating. I also attempt to insidiously implicate or insist life through emotional states in these figures by placing them in what I refer to as 'predicaments', in order to tell their stories. I move these inanimate objects through their external expressions and relationship to one another. I believe that these grotesque forms facilitate an inquiry into what it means to be real, or alive.

Confronted by their uncanny stillness, the imagination of the viewer is requested. I want the motion or movement implied by the text of the narrative and The Dolls’ surroundings. This impulse I have to create character, instills The Dolls with some manner of agency. My need to charge their predicaments, to disturb their stillness and activate them finds consolation in a reading of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. Like Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein,

[...] no one can conceive of the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success. Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs. Pursuing these reflections, I thought that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in the process of time [...] renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption (Shelley, 40).

The Dolls I have worked with are castaways, recovered from the dumpsters of consumer culture. In the Value Village and Salvation Army Store I scoured the shelves as a barren-wombed spinster, gathering an army of miscreants to adopt into my laboratory. The Dolls were collected, exorcized, categorized, then stripped. Their hair was pulled out and they were washed. They were then submerged into boiling wax, covered in porcelain and painted. Their costumes are sewn into their bodies. Then I conceived their symbolic life, wrote their short stories, art-direct their predicaments and created set-decorations and props.

I collected bones from the charnel houses and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame. In a solitary chamber, or rather a cell, at the top of my house, and separated from all other apartments by a gallery and a staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation (Ibid, 74).