Terrible Toys Invade Manhattan

Christina Rogers, Sandra Ogle, and Peter Campbell
Emma-Louise, New Orleans Abortion. Photo by Jonathan Gorman.

Severed doll-heads and grimacing clown faces stared down from the walls of the CBGB Art Gallery on the Bowery. Curious visitors shuffled in to see these bizarre and sometimes gruesome images, which evoked a range of reactions from gasps to awe. This year's Terrible Toy Fair was a provocative homage to the twisted inner child
 and its penchant for the horrific and profane. Curated by Emma-Louise, founder of the Dollhaus Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn where the show debuted last February, this year featured 130 artists from all over the country whose works display a skillful execution of craft and a unique sense of identity. The show was planned around the works of Mary Doyle, Chris Klapper, the Holy Graber, Zen, Alypne, Artur Arbit, The Empire S.N.A.F.U. restoration project, Miwa Yagi,
 and Emma-Louise herself. "We see ourselves very much on the other side of the commercial art world," said Emma-Louise. "This show provides a platform for unusual artists whose work might not appear in galleries in Chelsea."

The show was also a venue for new talent. Among the 130 artists featured in the gallery, 40 of them are high school students from
 Parsippany, NJ. Last year, Emma-Louise teamed up with high school art teacher Kerri Quick to start a project that encourages students to experiment with toys as an artistic medium. The students were immediately inspired by this project and ended up burning, sculpting and mutilating toys, landing many of their works in last year’s show. Two students returned to this year’s show.

The work ranged in tone from humorous, nostalgic memories of childhood to more darker depictions of the reality of being a child in an
 adult’s world, like Velocity Chyaldd's mutilated and bloody Mommy's Little Angel or Dollhaus artist Holy Graber’s Fragments, Remnants, and Memories, which consisted of a large dollhouse made of old bible pages with captions describing memories of childhood sexuality. Many of the pieces existed simply as playful visual jokes, such as What’s My Dolly Saw? By Eric Indin, which works on the juxtaposition of contrary materials, like the softness of a doll’s head shown against the hardness of a metal saw blade.

Others showed that the smallest modifications to commercially available toys and dolls, like the changing the color of the hair, or the switching of body parts, like Artur Arbit’s Borca, create totally different objects. Some of the pieces are more complex assemblages where the doll or toy is a small but integral part of a larger whole.