What do they see when they see us?
A pair of dolls, neatly ensconced in their school uniforms, is set within a street scene that seems to be closing in on them. Leering men are painted into the walls around the girls. The ogling of the men is overt enough to be grotesque. Their expressions are big enough to draw your attention away from the dolls – the girls – the central figures of the piece.
Isn’t that always the way?
The dolls described are from Wendy Nanan’s recent exhibition, West Indian Dolls, A Portrayal of Blackness. The one with the schoolgirls is called Did You Get the Pepper-Spray?
Mild terror may or may not be what Nanan was going for, but, throughout the exhibition, mild to escalating terror is what I got.
I don’t write about art as an art critic. I did not go to art-critic school. I did not teach myself the theory or language.
I do know a bit about existing in a hard, objectifying and objectionable world. And about fear, I know more than I’d like to.
[caption id="attachment_1039024" align="alignnone" width="870"] Searching for La Belle Creole, from Wendy Nanan's West Indian Dolls, a Portrayal of Darkness. - courtesy Medulla Art Gallery[/caption]
And in this work, using the dolls in and against different spaces, Nanan created the kinds of places and situations that show that not all scary is the same kind of scary.
Schoolgirls being harassed by grown men is, I hope, unacceptable to all. But the show also gave a sense of the fear of invisibility, of irrelevance, of erasure. In some ways, these less obvious terrors are more sinister precisely because they are semi-hidden or hiding in plain sight.
People still trying to survive in a city that is pushing them out hid in the shadows of buildings. Dolls with woven baskets and dresses you only see in touristy paintings were made all the more out of place by the all-metal buildings they wend their way through.
[caption id="attachment_1039025" align="alignnone" width="1024"] -[/caption]
The most extraordinary thing about the show was that it did not come merely from a place of darkness. Nanan has had many of the dolls for a long time. She kept them because they were so beautifully made.
And then she added to them other beautiful things: shawls, skirts, fruit. (If a piece of fabric goes missing from one of those dolls and it happens to be of a botanical print, I know nothing about it.)
But she did not keep them only for the excellent craftmanship. These dolls, apart from – or because of, or hinged on – their other travails, carry a great weight of race and colour.
These are blackface dolls, Aunt Jemima dolls, frankly, dolls I never thought I’d see again. But the question hanging over the whole show is a question not just for art, but also for literature and in general, the way we show ourselves to the world: why are we still representing ourselves as these relics of the past?
In the case of the dolls, some are seen, like the schoolgirls, in a manner that is of all time: the vulnerable versus predators.
But there are other doll
