currently on View :
‘Doll Hospital’
NENA CHRISTEINA, MAUREEN CONNOR, SARAH DAHLINGER, ETHEREALGIRL, SHIRAZ FAZLI, THEO GAFFNEY, ZACK HANDLER, CORNBREAD JIM, RACHEL KETTLER, JODIE LYN-KEE-CHOW, JOANNE MCFARLAND, CHRISTY O’CONNOR, MILO O’CONNELL, HEATHER ROSE PIPER, MAX SARMIENTO, ROSE SILBERMAN-GORN, PRESTON SPURLOCK, CLAIRE WEAVER-ZEMAN, RAVEN Z WILES, ALEXANDER ZEV
Curated by Sally Beauti Twin
April 11 - 26, 2025
Opening Reception: April 11, 6 - 9pm
Gallery Hours: Sat + Sun, 1 - 7pm, and by appointment
Doll Hospital opens at Stephen Street Gallery on April 11. Please bring a doll or figurine needing mending to the gallery to the opening or on the opening weekend for our artists to fix for you by show closing. Expect an artistic improvement to your doll - we’ll definitely not return it to you in its original condition
This art show promotes restringing, replacing and repainting. A Doll Hospital is now a rare service supplanted by disposable commodities. There were once multiple doll hospitals in New York in service to the small - repositories of rare parts from around the world. Antithetical to the current political climate this exhibition stands for care and preservation.
Doll Hospital will feature dazzling color, hyperbolic detail and polish, miniatures, maquettes from historic art shows, multi-media dioramas, creative re-envisioning of dolls, the self and its future. Media will include wood carvings, detailed oils, paper cut outs, wigs, ceramic planters, cloth and string sculpture, acrylic and pencil, marionettes.
When a maquette is seen as dollhouse, the audience of the art show is also a figure. Maureen Connor includes a mock-up of an explicitly political art show she held decades ago in Brooklyn's historic Momenta Gallery. We are thrilled by Maureen’s work and career with art directly addressing abortion, body issues, art institutions as workplaces, economic inequity, constitutional rights.
Dolls as scale reductions allow pocket sized panoramas - bigger stories are told in smaller spaces. A former architect, Max Sarmiento, puts his love for circus and fireworks as well as intimate history with Ecuadorian healing and traditional medicine into panoramic dioramas for consideration. A collection of dolls is optimally non-homogenous and when new combinations enter the doll chambers, interactions between people are re-considered.
Beholding the international, Shiraz Fazli’s dolls “satirize the diasporic experience by referencing current Afghan visual tropes. [Shiraz] also uses ‘anti-calligraphy’ to explore spiritual contradictions.”
Milo O’Connell, a trans woman, travels to queer doll get togethers and has incorporated dolls into performance art for years. She maintains a human-scale playwright practice but has been pulling audiences through the fourth wall in having them play with her dolls (and a fifth wall, each other) mid-way through performances. As trans gender people frequently feel born into bodied that limit or does not represent who they are - dolls allow reshaping representations of one’s self.
We offer a retreat to the miniature - a third space for play or meditation. As Rachel Kettler says, “focusing on the smallest details, being so precise with gluing and cutting…hours go by and then I have to laugh because all I have in front of me is a bundle of grapes smaller than a dime” and, “…it’s nice to not worry about the outcome of a project or hours or work being anything huge. Both figuratively and literally.”
With dolls we can make forms that are allies, enemies, or other characters purposeful for dramatic exploration of society and its possibilities. And these figures are notes for memory - shows of our childhoods and its differences from others. Or our adulthoods…. Christy O’Connor’s doll representations satirize those who “turn one’s self into a commodity for the male gaze, fighting for the crumbs at the top, reducing themselves to doll parts with a limited shelf life.”
You are invited to these mock-ups of ideal worlds, a very personal artists’ space, a temporary house of focus in a loud time, a place of service to the youthful injury or simply a return to a fun way of seeing.
U P C o mi n g :
‘The Last Time I’ll Use Plastic’
Wyatt Bertz
May 3-25, 2025
Opening Reception: May 3, 6-9pm
Gallery Hours: Saturday and Sunday, 1-7pm, or by appointment
In “The Last Time I’ll Use Plastic,” Wyatt Bertz presents several new, flashy works that push consumer culture to a breaking point, made with epoxies, 3D-printed plastics, aerosols, and rhinestones.
"As a kid growing up in a monotonous suburb outside of Boston, I coveted everything colorful, plastic, and unnecessary—I was obsessed with sports cars, the drizzle on Dunkin Donuts specialty beverages, cheese-dusted processed foods, brightly-lit malls, pomeranians, advertisements, and other hallmarks of American capitalism. The walls of my bedroom were a collaged shrine to consumer culture - mostly cut from the pages of bling-era duPont Registry and various men’s health magazines - which to me, represented an escape from the boredom and repression I felt. Now as an adult stuck in an endless pursuit of awareness, and as an artist drawn to plastics and resins, I am reckoning with my relationship to these seductive objects, and the place I learned to fetishize them.
"In the process of fabricating the pieces for this show, I became increasingly disgusted with their materials, which are drippy, shiny, incredibly toxic to work with, and produce lots of waste. For my own health, and my community’s, and the world’s, I make this naive promise: this is the last time I'll use plastic."
A 6-foot tall neon pink Holy Cross with 11 glittering, spinning wheels embedded with thousands of rhinestones, a small chair made of epoxy blocks containing 200 toy-sized fluorescent pink hot rods, and a pendant lamp covered in a rainbow swarm of Hot Wheels cars all reflect Wyatt’s interest in how the built world is wrought from, resembles, and ultimately returns to, the natural and spiritual worlds. A 3D video work features one of Wyatt’s original characters, an alter-ego wandering through a digital suburban environment while pondering questions of desire and existence.
Viewers can think of this show at Stephen Street as a last hurrah for all things processed, plastic, and suburban; an over-the-top relic of post-capitalist decadence, preserved forever - as if in a glacier, but in fact in petroleum-based transparent epoxy - as we yearn a new era of making and consuming.