‘Doll Hospital’
Nena Christeina, Maureen Connor, Sarah Dahlinger, Shiraz Fazli, Theo Gaffney, Zack Handler, Cornbread Jim, Rachel Kettler, Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow, 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 a Brooklyn Gallery now closed. 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.