Excerpt from catalog essay for the Charlotte Street Fund Exhibition
Kate Hackman, Curator
Kati Toivanen is emblematic of a younger generation of artists using the camera as a tool for creating artworks as conceptually rich as they are technically accomplished. Equally at ease with computers as with film, she moves freely among approaches, adapting tactics to suit ideas. This facility is evident in work created specifically for Artspace, where the photograph serves merely as a starting point for sculpture, installation, even performance. Here Toivanen weaves together many themes explored through earlier bodies of work including issues of gender stereotypes, sexuality, play and games, voyeurism, a tension between the seen and unseen, the suggestive and explicit.
Toivanen has created an interactive space, inviting a process of personal discovery. Using a strategy of appropriation, she relies on familiarity with popular games and toys to draw us into play, then disrupts expectation. In lieu of the seemingly innocuous images we nostalgically anticipate are pictures of baby dolls, often mangled from use and abuse, and tangles of synthetic hair. Each presentation represents a specific permutation of ideas. A memory game, comprising a search for pairs, requires flipping red cardboard squares - an activity evoking a peep show, where fragments of bodies are revealed then quickly concealed. A puzzle involves a prolonged quest to reconcile hundreds of pieces into one seamless whole. The very name "Viewmaster" alludes to the possessive nature of the viewer's gaze, as we peer through lenses to spy life-like visions held forever beyond reach. Through all of these formats, Toivanen explores desire as a suspended longing, seduction as reliant on delaying/denying satisfaction. (Once the puzzle is complete, it no longer holds our attention.) Disturbing this formula by means of un-idealized images ranging from alarming to absurd, heart-wrenching to repulsive, she forces an awareness and self-consciousness that counteract the escapist pleasure of play. The rigorous stylistic closeness of her co-options to their standard forms - crisp, graphic, iconic, commercially packaged - renders them all the more potent. We are left to question the nature of these games and dolls, and ourselves, as they stare back demanding a second look.
Kate Hackman