Terrible Toys Invade Manhattan
Christina Rogers, Sandra Ogle, and Peter Campbell
grimacing clown faces stared down from the walls of the CBGB Art Gallery on the
Bowery. Curious visitors shuffled in to see these bizarre and sometimes
gruesome images, which evoked a range of reactions from gasps to awe. This
year’s Terrible Toy Fair was a provocative homage to the twisted inner child
and its penchant for the horrific and profane. Curated by Emma-Louise, founder
of the Dollhaus Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn where the show debuted last
February, this year featured 130 artists from all over the country whose works
display a skillful execution of craft and a unique sense of identity. The show
was planned around the works of Mary Doyle, Chris Klapper, the Holy Graber,
Zen, Alypne, Artur Arbit, The Empire S.N.A.F.U. restoration project, Miwa Yagi,
and Emma-Louise herself. "We see ourselves very much on the other side of
the commercial art world," said Emma-Louise. "This show provides a
platform for unusual artists whose work might not appear in galleries in
Chelsea."
The show was also a venue for new talent. Among the 130
artists featured in the gallery, 40 of them are high school students from
Parsippany, NJ. Last year, Emma-Louise teamed up with high school art teacher
Kerri Quick to start a project that encourages students to experiment with toys
as an artistic medium. The students were immediately inspired by this project
and ended up burning, sculpting and mutilating toys, landing many of their
works in last year’s show. Two students returned to this year’s show.
The work ranged in tone from humorous, nostalgic memories
of childhood to more darker depictions of the reality of being a child in an
adult’s world, like Velocity Chyaldd’s mutilated and bloody Mommy’s Little
Angel or Dollhaus artist Holy Graber’s Fragments,
Remnants, and Memories, which consisted of
a large dollhouse made of old bible pages with captions describing memories of
childhood sexuality. Many of the pieces existed simply as playful visual jokes,
such as What’s My Dolly Saw? by
Eric Indin, which works on the juxtaposition of contrary materials, like the
softness of a doll’s head shown against the hardness of a metal saw blade.
Others showed that the smallest modifications to commercially available toys
and dolls, like the changing the color of the hair, or the switching of body
parts, like Artur Arbit’s Borca,
create totally different objects. Some of the pieces are more complex
assemblages where the doll or toy is a small but integral part of a larger
whole.
