Playing With Dolls


      The vision of babies that recurs in my work is not accidental. My work takes the shape of my obsessions. Just as for Freud, ancient objects became metaphors for primal states, so for me, the accessories of childhood unlock an archaeology of the mind. The xerox or  printer scan are ideal mediums for accomplishing this. The light is pure Caravaggio, while the glass plate becomes the perfect stage for dreamlike juxtapositions. My love of the doll imagery of Joseph Cornell and James Ensor, for instance, is partly born of the sense of childhood kept alive. Their work preserves the uncanny perception of dolls’ attractive creepiness, a seeming consciousness. Received ideas are unwittingly incarnated in the manufactured rubber objects and identities emerge. Using artificial breasts, snakes, naked babies and other props, I give that consciousness expression, satirizing what was unwitting and making it manifest and visceral: a weird vision ripe with resonant gender tensions, aesthetic hierarchies, neuroses, and - I hope- spirituality. Seeing my photocopy-based art, people laugh and squirm. Even as they feel the release of humor, such things shouldn’t be funny.