The American Dollhouse Series!
The American Dollhouse is a series of photographs and poems centered around a masked family co-inhabiting a miniature dollhouse. The concept of shooting in a dollhouse originally arose as an alternative to creating expensive large-scale sets. I came to the realization that by shooting in miniature, I could capture the full expanse of a room without having access to the costly resources. Furthermore, I realized that the dollhouse could function as a metaphor, providing the perfect stage for the examination of the larger world it so innocently tries to emulate. The dollhouse, which has become an iconic childhood toy, is for many, the earliest indoctrination of the ‘American dream’, conveying to children at an impressionable age an idealistic representation of what the nuclear family should look like. While the dollhouse attempts to be sweet and inviting, in its gross oversimplification of reality, it renders itself artificial and somewhat hollow, as if to suggest, perhaps, that there were more to the story than what is being told.
In this series, I seek to uncover these untold stories by exploring the darker facets of the dollhouse, and furthermore, the American dream. Beneath the façade of perfection, we witness the inhabitants struggling with their own silent pains, the unspoken truths that exist beneath the external masks they all wear. Each character’s profound desire to break free of the house, of each other, is juxtaposed against the unbreakable bonds of bloodline, obligation, ritual and societal expectation. They are bound to this house, to each other, for better or worse. The very structure designed to safeguard them from the outside world is in essence their oppressor, a physical manifestation of the constrictions of the world around them. Within these confines, their inner dramas unfold, the incessant conflict between appearance and reality, duty and desire, public versus private takes place. The American Dollhouse is a personification of the American dream, wrought with its intrinsic flaws and sinister connotations.
