s4text
17 April 2024

I started making sculptures based on kachina dolls in 1987.

It began with a doll I bought at the Brooklyn Museum out of a $1 sale bin, a sagging cardboard box full of 4″ fluorescent orange or green figurines with feathers attached to their heads. These were generic versions of what I thought were Hopi “stomach ache”-style dolls, roughly carved in solid wood and painted with marks bearing no true relation to the coded combinations found on actual Hopi dolls. There was no indication of who had made the objects in the bin or where they actually came from. They seemed to be in limbo. I wasn’t seduced by their forms or tantalized by any idea of them as Other or Outside or Transgressive. The bin dolls for me occupied an awkward space between commerce and culture/s, mutely tragic sculptural objects as a kind of burdened kitsch on their way to becoming something else. The box that containd the dolls was itself a peculiar museum within a museum.

I made an oversize copy of the doll out of corrugated cardboard and hot glue. I had been working with cardboard for a few years, making large scale, disposable environments. The doll was the first standalone, “figurative” piece I’d made to exist outside of the context of an installation. It was a strange choice, easy to make but hard to fit with either my past or present experience. I remember thinking it was a substitute, hollow and conservative. I was making an artifact.

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