Dolls
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It was very interesting to discover that there are so many dolls out there in the market, just by searching on the internet I found entire forums on dolls, not Barbies, but many versions of the most refined, strange, and unusual dolls for collection.
Three years ago I bought a doll from Korea, a beautiful piece of art, and with it I made a lot of digital and oil paintings. I am still doing it, my research with the doll seems to have no end, I have infinite questions for the doll, therefore I keep photographing it.
Because of the fact that my doll was actually designed by another artist, I had to digitally modify her face features in the photographs. If I hadn’t done that, I would probably have made my artwork about somebody else’s art. So the figure in my paintings look slightly different from how the original doll looks (the original is basically not recognizable).
All of my artwork with dolls can be viewed at: www.bambee.org
Why do I like dolls so much? I suppose because they are creepy. If you think about antique porcelain dolls, there is something so sinister about them that it is worth looking deeper into the subject and ask yourself why this is. As humans we are all sinister as much as those dolls who were made to represent us.
As God may have created humans to match his or her own image and semblance, humans have created dolls in the same manner, to stand in the place of God, only to realize that whatever could resemble their image returned the mortal aspect of them. A doll is a broken love. A doll is a token from the past, a leftover, an envelope, a shell…
It reminds me that I used to be a child once upon a time, a nice well dressed cuddled child, so fragile and so defenseless, so pliable: the doll mirrors back to me all of these things. Even thought the doll is just an object, if I put on it a beautiful dress I can have the feeling of having returned to a time of happiness and love when the radiant eyes of the child expect things to go right: they expect life to be forever wonderful and dreamy.
Some women may identify so much with dolls because they have got two or more characteristics in common with them. One of these characteristics is the “object”. A woman placed like an ornament in a golden house feels similar to a doll. A beautiful woman may ask herself if she looks like one: beauty is the other common feature, fragility the third, a doll is easily unmounted, and women’s physical strenght is weaker than men’s.
The fragility of a doll is mixed with its sinister beauty and misterious, hidden, and forgotten soul: the unresponsive imagined soul of the mystified object. They make me think about something or someone forgotten long time ago that starts to walk and glance back again. The doll’s eyes are vacuous, and this is terribly creepy, and terribly sad if I identify with that look, and put my own past in there.
Are women supposed to have a soul, a subjectivity completely free from the subliminal and interwoven ties placed by the continuous quest for how to be perfect like a doll, good like a doll, frozen like one? Can the subject, deeply identifying with an object as such, exist without a residual internal conflict, without inevitably feeling like a container or a leftover? Is it possible to be both human and plastic?
I’ll keep putting make-up on the dolls I find… And I’ll keep taking pictures of them.
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Chessboards
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The chessboard is a playground. Visually a floor with no patterns would convey the feeling of inconsistency: it could become a slippery floor, one with no reference points, no distinction between near and far, and maybe no clear divide between the sky and the earth.
The checkered floor indicates me precisely where it begins and where it ends, it also makes me recognize any of its irregularities, the lines that cross it make me be sure of bumps and holes, I feel secure on it, and I would definitely better dance with my feet on it rather than choose a one color floor.
It is an horizontal plane traced with charcoal, and painted with thick varnish: the Chessboard, the place where precise and well thought moves are to be made by many pieces. A large checkered floor with actors as elements of the game, could be the parody of a real life battle.
Imagine to stand on this kind of floor, or on a big chessboard where the squares are sufficiently big to contain comfortably both feet of an individual, then you would impersonate one of the pieces of this game: standing there would mean waiting for some check from anywhere, and anytime to come and scatter you away, you are then playing a “life game”.
Look out for your life, be really careful not to stand on the Bishop’s path, or the Tower’s: remember how all the others pieces move, and in what direction they’ll go…
In my video “The Tower Trilogy”, the first part is about a frenetic and intermittent movement of the head of a doll child, trying to deceive and escape from this kind of dangerous external merciless check. It is a mortal check, but until it really comes in, you don’t really know where it comes from, as it always gets its targets by surprise.
Years ago I was observing a friend of mine performing a strange game with his life: after seeing that I decided to set up a scene in my video that would have to convey a sense of “insecure position”, representing an endangered and uncontrolled state in a mad and exessively fast world of betrayal.
This kind of position on the red spot of the checkered floor would have to be clear: the “self”, the piece owned by the viewer, is exposed and threatened by an invisible checker at any time… The Trilogy is about the “loss of control”, a theme that I kept following and developing throughout all of my video work.
The loss of control is a major subject in my visual research, and it is thanks to the possibility of making the images “move” with film and video, that I’ve been able to represent this concept the way I wanted.
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