Koplin Del Rio

My “Drown the Dolls” series explores this 50 year old icon that women hate to love and love to hate. Everyone seems to have their own Barbie story. Many love her. Personally, I find her equally fascinating and repulsive. I see her as an indoctrinating tool that insists on a societal standard of what is attractive for women that is as relentlessly fake as it is unattainable.

In the work, the formal compositions of refraction and reflection mirror the way women have seen themselves reflected, for better or worse—
I believe, for worse-- in Barbie’s image: her constant smile, implausible waistline, her over-blonde hair. The works hint both at the drowned dreams and the submerged angers this unreachable societal ideal evokes within us from early girlhood. The paintings literally shove her in our faces, the same way society shoves this ideal at us.

What woman doesn’t want to torture this doll? My anecdotal research indicates most have, even those who loved her, eventually cutting her hair, chopping off her head. As if somehow they knew it wasn’t all just play…

I remember the first and last time I played with dolls on a childhood friend’s front lawn. I ran home as soon as I could ashamed and disturbed, somehow convinced I had been coerced into doing something really creepy. To this day, when I had to dress dolls for these pool photo shoots, it made me feel a little sick putting her dead plastic body with her little fetus feet into those high heeled shoes.
 
But, the doll just keeps smiling: here, suffocating, drowned. As we’re taught: stay beautiful and smiling no matter what you feel or what happens. My metaphor for what society wants its little girls to learn. Even if it suffocates them.

And yet, there is also a joy to the paintings, a playfulness and joy that comes from sorting out the image from the mirror side, of going from “Is that?” to “That is.” Of visiting a watery, soothing world that we would otherwise only quickly glimpse, here held in suspension. Of sorting what is real in a three dimensional sense from what is false reflection. But, then again, it’s all “false”. It’s all plastic. The doll, and the paint. There is no truth here.

The reflective undersurface of the pool provides a tension as it creates its own plane on the canvas that is neither a three dimensional classic “window into a world”, nor strictly a two-dimensional canvas surface. This third dimension allows for patternization, flattening of form and abstraction, which plays against the other plane’s more representational reality.

Beneath the surface, the dolls are trapped in an airless world. The question posed is: is it the doll that I’ve trapped under the water, or is it a part of ourselves trapped within her, that can’t breath? The submerged world works as metaphor for the subconscious mind with its claustrophobic depths and inner logic. There, we, too, can be trapped and never break the surface to the real world of air and light and realized self unhampered and unlimited by society’s shallow standards of the feminine. They both hold us down, the water’s skin and the doll’s skin deep beauty. Both are worlds of beauty, but neither ultimately is inhabitable.

Daena Title
2010