| Artist Statment |
I knew I shouldn't have let you play with dolls,” my mother once told me. (Whether she was more upset about my being an artist or my being gay it would be hard to say.) The vision of babies that recurs in my work is not accidental. My work takes the shape of my obsessions. Just as for Freud, ancient objects became metaphors for primal states, so for me, the accessories of childhood unlock an archaeology of the mind.
The xerox is an ideal medium for accomplishing this. The light of the color copier is pure Caravaggio, while the glass plate becomes the perfect stage for dreamlike juxtapositions. My love of the doll imagery of Joseph Cornell and James Ensor, for instance, was partly born of the sense of childhood kept alive. Their work preserves the uncanny sense of dolls' attractive creepiness, a seeming consciousness. Received ideas are unwittingly incarnated in the manufactured rubber objects and identities emerge. Using artificial breasts, snakes and naked babies, I give that consciousness expression, satirizing what was unwitting and making it manfest and visceral: a weird vision ripe with resonances of gender tensions, aesthetic hierarchies, desires for abuse, and - I hope - spirituality. Seeing my photocopy art, people laugh and squirm. Even as they feel the release of humor, such things shouldn't be funny. David Fratkin |