A baby-doll in cast glass from Lindsay Craig's "Playing with Dolls" series, part of a larger exhibition opening at the Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery on October 18th.
In the simplest of conceptions, masks conceal while glass reveals. Such conceptions collide, however, in a new exhibition opening in October at the Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery, a progressive non-profit arts space less than two hours’ drive from Toronto in Waterloo, Ontario. Taking as its point of departure a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson (“Society is a masked ball, where everyone hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding”), “The Masked Ball” offers viewers a chance to reflect on what it means to look but not see. Appropriately, glass is the perfect medium to test Emerson’s conjecture, for it allows one of the artists featured here to attempt to reveal a truth by cloaking it in a material that has at least the potential for transparency.
“The Masked Ball” will incorporate work from three artists, including Lindsay Craig with her doll-like figures in cast and mounted glass. Conceived of as a critique of good taste, Craig’s portion of the exhibition, individually titled “Playing with Dolls,” refutes what the artist sees as “the safe and narrow choice” good taste requires by taking as its model a baby doll produced in the late 1940s by the Reliable Toy Company. As a muse, the doll is slightly creepy and certainly kitschy, but it also come packed with associations that cannot be constrained within its replicas’ fragile bellies—ideas of childhood, motherhood, and femininity that are bound together in one form. Craig has masked the dolls’ faces with bronze, leaving eerie voids for eyes that reveal the slippery glass surfaces underneath.
Craig’s recent perfume bottles in cast glass and bronze also deal with feminine archetypes: woman as earth-mother, goddess, or even mermaid, each presented as a vessel that is functional (at least in theory). Whimsical yet weighty, like the figurehead on the prow of a ship, these vessels share at least one characteristic of the baby doll replicas: both bodies of work emulate objects that are “low-art” and mass-produced, objects that are perceptibly devoid of serious aesthetic value. As Craig, quoted in the gallery’s press release, puts it: “There are many varieties of schools of tastes in objects”—but it doesn’t hurt that she’s working in a medium that asserts such a strong material presence, which allows her to effectively aestheticize the commonplace.
The exhibition will also include figurative works in ceramic by Aganetha Dyck and Carole Epp. “The Masked Ball” opens October 18, with a reception from 1 to 5 PM, and will remain on view through January 10, 2010. Directions, exhibit hours, and travel information are available here.
—Analisa Coats Bacall
