Doll Inhabitation - Darlene Kaczmarczyk photo exhibit

Darlene Kaczmarczyk: Standards/Deviations

Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts

Grand Rapids, Michigan

May 18-June 29, 2001

He himself was a believer; he affirmed the miracle of translation-the near sacred moment in which the miniature artifacts of the layout no longer merely represented Earth but became Earth. And he and the others, joined together in the fusion of doll-inhabitation by means of the Can-D, were transported outside of time and local space.

--Phillip Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Like Phillip Dick's 1964 novel about Mars colonists, Darlene Kaczmarczyk's photographs investigate our human desire to be transported. Through her pairing of dollhouse play and the elaborate theatrical act of making photographs, she illuminates parallels between the two activities and the human drives common to both.

A cursory viewing of "The Doll House" series, if seen removed from the context of the other three bodies of work present in this exhibition, might appear to speak narrowly on the role of gender in society, and seem somewhat derivative of the work of Laurie Simmons, who also utilizes images of dolls as surrogates to call into question our preconceptions about gender roles. But, collectively, these bodies of work address issues that are manifest in a wide range of social phenomena, and they do so in a manner that is playful, in the questioning, experimental sense, as well as humorous.

This exhibition does deal with issues of gender stereotyping, body image and voyeurism, and much can be said about the sophisticated layers that Kaczmarczyk has built on these subjects in her work. However, what is most interesting about these photographs is the way in which they draw attention to the mechanism of fantasy, and to our escapist desires to translate our experiences into fictional projections. Because this kind of projection is a key ingredient in the cocktail of gender and body-type role creations, as well as a major part of the making and reception of artistic images (photographs in particular), there is value in looking at it more closely.

In Dick's novel and in Kaczmarczyk's images, the dollhouse takes on a very different role from the dollhouse of Henrik Ibsen's play of the same name, for rather than a metaphor for life's tendency to mimic the arena of childhood play, Dick's dollhouses, or "layouts" as he refers to them, are altars, where each element has to be laid out just right, so that the layout can function as a vehicle for conjuring up another, more pleasurable reality. While Ibsen's play establishes the potency of the dollhouse as a symbol, Dick's novel and Kaczmarczyk's work cast a critical gaze on dollhouse play itself as a phenomenon central to our experience.

The show includes two suites of photographs of dolls and toy figures arranged in dollhouses, "The Doll House" series (which consists of 11 pinhole photographs) and "The White Family" (consisting of 10 large format prints). These two series are separated (and bookended) by a series of four large photograms entitled "SML" (2000), that comprise a third suite of pictures and also provide a crucial added dimension to the meanings that arise in the other photographs. In the vaultlike "Inspace" Kaczmarczyk has built a tableau, "Access" (2001), that is viewed by looking out the window of a dollhouse into the installation beyond.

Through each process that she adopts, Kaczmarczyk further subjectifies the photographic gaze and reminds us of the presence of a camera, and of the controlling author behind the camera. By doing so she disrupts and draws attention to our desire to believe in the scene that we see. In "The Doll House" series she does this with the pinhole camera view and its blurred periphery, which emphasizes the expressive and subjective position of the photographs.

In the "White Family" series, she pushes the shallow line of focus (often diagonally slicing through the composition) so that the hierarchy of focus does not obey any familiar pictorial structure. In the installation "Access," she makes use of a pre-packaged photo-mural to create an almost (but not quite) seamless illusion. All of these techniques remind us that there is a second layer of "playing house" that is superimposed on the pictured dollhouses.

Kaczmarczyk has punctuated her two major suites of photographs with the series "SML" which consists of large photograms of clothing and serve as breaks or chapter headings between the texts. The first of these (the first picture seen when entering the gallery, and the weakest piece in the show) prepares the viewer to expect a cliche treatment of gender stereotyping. The large photogram of a woman's apron is flanked by small 1950's images of little girls hanging dresses on a clothesline. Fortunately things become much more polyvalent in the photographs that follow as the details and poetic insertions pile up.

These ingredients reach critical mass in the first pinhole photograph, Late (1999), which depicts an oversized doll with her head pressed against the ceiling of a dollhouse. Like the Jewish Giant who looms over his parents in their living room in Dianne Arbus's photograph The Jewish Giant at Home (1970), this doll is also a side-show freak: the Fat Woman. She sports an excess of eye shadow and towers over 20 tiny infants scattered around on the floor and furniture in the room. There is an obvious humor in the work that takes the little girls' fantasy game of "let's play baby" and explodes it into the grotesque and expressionistic. This kind of perverse scene is also reminiscent of the other overt reference (invoked by the title and reinforced by the presence of a clock in the mother's hand) to the part of Alice in Wonderland where Alice sips a potion that makes her grow. In both of these instances the desire that little girls have to grow up and be big is pushed to excess. Whatever the underlying connotation of this growth might be, whether that growth is related to puberty, pregnancy or obesity, it flies in the face of the pretend utopias of girls at play.