Beneath the Valley of the Dolls

TODD / BROWNING GALLERY
Through October 3, 2009

Contemporary photographs by

Jessica Robertson

Kelly Smith

Larry Torno

Tiffany Trenda

Building minature sets inside a three-foot-square box, Australian-based photographer Jessica Robertson creates fictional worlds where dolls act our darkly human impulses.  Using real-life encounters as inspiration, these dioramas expose painful, confronting and compromising moments that are seldom displayed for public consumption. While archiving the Lester Glassner Collection for the Library of Congress in September 1999, Kelly Smith encountered Mr. Glassner’s private collection of antique dolls, figurines and masks from the early 20th century. Seeing the artistic potential in these artifacts, Kelly urged Mr. Glassner to allow him to photograph his collection as portraits.  These works are comprised almost entirely of headshots; the close-ups suggest an unusually scrupulous examination of antiquity, populism, and image. While the dolls themselves generally represent human form, Smith’s colorful and carefully posed portraits of these inanimate objects are surprisingly, and perhaps disturbingly, humanistic in impact. California performance artist Tiffany Trenda’s digital photographs aim to humanize the artificial, substituting the doll or mannequin’s blank features with her own self-portrait. Barbie, created by Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler, was unveiled at the American Toy Fair in New York City on March 9, 1959.  By experimenting with composition and light, St. Louis-based Larry Torno infuses personalities into otherwise lifeless plastic, and the photos of the famous figure evolve from simple documentation to a kind of portraiture.  Through these vivid images of the timeless figure, Torno liberates Barbie from her box and places her again into the realm of the imagination.