DOLLHOUSE SERIES (2020 - )
The Unhomely Dollhouse
Translation is always an incomplete and imperfect process that leaves a residue of awkwardness behind. Art history is more or less predicated on how inspired (or not) an artist’s ability to translate a concept or an observed phenomenon into something concrete that is shared with an audience. When one adds the distancing that occurs with time, this becomes all the more exaggerated as the work asks that we look beyond styles, sensibilities, and conventions that made perfect sense in an historical moment, yet appear unusual or unrelatable to our current situation. Masters old, new, and reconsidered became and/or remain such because of their ability to capture a truly timeless quality, one that transcends the fashions and modalities of the moment in which their work was made. What happens when we look at these past examples of figurative art in a way that makes us conscious and aware of their subjects’ actual clothed or unclothed physicality, rather than on the artistry used to represent them or the historical circumstances that justified their being painted in the first place?
Jamie Adams’ paintings from his recent Dollhouse series seem to suggest exactly what happens if a classical tradition of representing people in works of art is engaged in a serious form of play that echoes the kind that transpires within its titular namesake. They are the result of traditional notions of history painting becoming a wardrobe of sorts for dressing and re-dressing contemporary notions of identity and visualization. In other words, translating current values of representational agency into a format from the distant art historical past. These works and earlier ones in Adams’ career typically feature figures defined, as the artist has noted, by their “mis-fitted-ness.” This is not to say that they are populated by individuals that fit any conceivable and especially conventional characterization of a “misfit.” Adams’ subjects channel too much of the assuredness that comes with their rendering according to traditional / classical standards of figurative presentation for that. Rather, they appear ill-suited (pun occasionally intended) to their surroundings, to the garments they wear, or to the other figures with whom they share a particular setting or composition. Note the images in which a woman cited as “Jeannie” in the titles and who is inspired by the iconic French new wave actress and activist Jean Seberg appears wearing suits and jackets that either engulf her form or ride up the arms to reveal sleeves and folds of clothing that feel uncomfortably present and overwhelming. In Jeannie(Roses) especially the red garment billows so far out of proportion to the figure that her head seems disconcertingly small.
Adams’ twists on proportion, his frequently extravagant distortions of the figure, and his situating his subjects within interiors that spatially compress them or landscapes in which they feel incongruously placed suggest an affinity with and relationship to surrealism—both the capital “S” 20th Century movement and the more generalized sensibility it embodied. Yet Adams’ intention and affect are not those of startling the viewer or triggering unexpected psychological associations through unexpected juxtapositions or alarming reconfigurations and mergers of bodies and visages. Instead he seems to be reminding us of the manner in which the hitherto unfamiliar and the uncanny have become the new normal. This is further enhanced by his execution of these scenes and portraits in the manner of European painting styles of past centuries, embedding peculiarities and eccentricities within a visual framework that continues to endure and to connote a sense of authority. Even animate accessories or embellishments—lap dogs here, a vase of flowers or a bird or two there—contribute to Adams’ complex layering of art historical antecedents, appearing to be both deliberately out of place in one picture and iconographically significant in another. Central to an appreciation of this curious dynamic between the unfamiliar and the utterly at-home in Adams’ paintings is the complicatedly various processes of translation and interpretation that are fundamental to their development. Adams considers the “Jeannie” figure alluded to previously to be an alter ego of sorts, an embodiment of his appreciation and understanding of “the feminine,” both within his own personality and in his perception of others. Much of the work in his Dollhouse series stems from his relationship with his daughters, not only in terms of what he has observed from his perspective as a parent as they have become fully realized adults, but also through conversations with them that led to these paintings specifically. The appearance, circumstance, and positioning of the women in the pictures were determined by Adams’ daughters in discussions about how they would most like to be represented pictorially. This ceding of control to the subject in determining how they wish to be seen and portrayed is an approach that has become critical in the use of the figure in art of recent decades (most pointedly in works by queer artists and artists of color in reclaiming agency over one’s own representation.) As much as Adams can faithfully interpret his daughters’ conceptualizations of how they might most ideally appear pictorially, translation of another’s intentions, desires, and self-image is always vulnerable to unwieldy variances. Each corporeal or sartorial exaggeration or evocation of “mis-fitted-ness” speaks to this interpretative challenge.
Indeed, this quality is taken to extremes (and painterly heights) in the uneasy and ungainly physicality that defines Bubba Bebop. The painting is the result of an intensive and multilayered process of translation and reinterpretation. Its figurative grouping features four women rendered in symmetrically seated and standing poses encircling a central male protagonist frozen in a pirouette-like pose atop a tree stump. (The emphasis on women in the picture is notable considering an inspiration for the work’s composition was Max Beckmann’s Young Men by the Sea, 1943, in the collection of the Saint Louis Art Museum.) The women are attired in combinations of sports bras and tank-tops, undergarments, and the kind of loose casual wear typically worn around the house—all serving to either accentuate or mask the distortions and contortions of their bodies. The faces of the figures on the right are shown in profile or three-quarters pose while those of the women on the left are uncomfortably and seemingly deliberately twisted away from the viewer’s gaze, starkly contrasting them as active (especially the one walking and taking notes) or passive. Adams uses a relatively muted color scheme – primarily grays, silvers, and earth-tones—for both the austere oceanside setting and the figures and their clothing, which serves to intensify the metallic reds and blues and yellows of wavy hairstyles and the colorful and oddly displaced hummingbirds that flank the humans on either side more distinct. The unnatural poses and movements of the subjects reflect their being informed by imagery from such divergent sources as the film Singing in the Rain or paintings from centuries past. They also evoke Adams’ translation of sculptural clay maquettes, whose material malleability is perhaps most emphatically and unsettlingly evident in the second figure from the left, whose gesture of grasping at her shirt twists her torso and especially her shoulders and bulging neck into a shockingly unnatural position.
While Bubba Bebop’s subjects share a tight spatial radius and even seem to touch or at least overlap, they remain utterly disconnected from and oblivious to one another. A sentimental reading—based on Adams’ involvement of his daughters in other works from this series—is that of a family self-portrait, with the artist at the center and the surrounding women his daughters who now lead lives that keep them proximate yet still in a relatively detached orbit. Perhaps a more compelling and open-ended way to read the picture is to see it as a reflection of a sense of increasing societal disconnectedness that we are all experiencing to some degree, one that has developed, ironically enough, from technologies and social media phenomena intended to put us more actively in touch with one another. Returning to Adams’ titling of this particular suite of works, one is reminded of the many literary and cinematic uses of the words “doll” and “dollhouse”—from Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 play A Doll’s House, to Jacqueline Susann’s novel Valley of the Dolls (1966), to the more recent example of Todd Solondz’ 1995 film Welcome to the
Dollhouse. All share Adams’ emphasis on grown (or growing) women at odds with their surroundings and an allusion to toys primarily associated with girls that engages a complex dialogue between innocence and experience. His more literal use of both doll-sized sculpted figures and a dollhouse structure to develop his painted scenarios as well as notwithstanding, further evokes the manner in which play and fantasy enacted by children allows them a certain mastery over their relationship to the adult world – be it healthy or dysfunctional. Adams’ transference and translation of these processes into the very serious and sophisticated domain of classically-informed figurative painting adds yet another layer to the dynamic of mis-fitted-ness that pervades the series. On the surface his Dollhouse works feature mostly female subjects with intensely proportioned garments and bodies in undetermined settings. Yet they ultimately point further and deeper into our universal negotiations of the uneasy translations, incomplete interpretations, and their resultant discordances that define our everyday lives.
Dominic Molon
Richard Brown Baker Curator of Contemporary Art
Rhode Island School of Design Museum