UMKC Belger Arts Center, Kansas City, MO
Catalog Essay by
Kate Hackman
Curator
Kati Toivanen's "Whirl" is an evocative, immersive installation environment which invokes the iconography of play to confront a range of issues related to childhood and passages to adulthood. Though each artwork functions independently, the exhibition was conceived and resonates as a unified whole - a poetic, layered landscape of images, objects, video projections, and sounds. Sensations and meanings compound through the course of navigating this charged terrain of familiar but significantly altered games and toys. Throughout, we are reminded of the double-edged nature of play as (not unlike art) having both nothing and everything to do with "real life." While designed for pleasure/release, games are also vehicles for defining identity: testing abilities, absorbing codes, acquiring skills, forming relationships, establishing rank. By mining the metaphoric potential of these matters, Toivanen gives physical form to the emotional complexities of childhood and the potential for pain inextricably linked to traversing life's "playground." "Whirl" ultimately exposes play as a potent symbolic language, cultural ritual, and rite of passage that leaves lasting marks.
Concerns relating to childhood and its enduring legacies have been central to Kati Toivanen's work for some time. Over the last several years, her photographic images of dolls have explored the social significance and connotative capacities of Barbie and her cousins, both as cultural artifacts and as human surrogates. Manipulating shadow, light, and pose, she has cast the dolls and their constituent parts in a range of roles and scenarios - as everything from elusive, seductive icons of femininity to fragile, forgotten waifs bruised by aggressive play. The images of these "at once innocent and fallen" creatures, as she describes them, illuminate their at turns alluring and horrific aspects, while also figuring a spectrum of emotional states, perhaps most poignantly the vulnerability and confusion of a girl's transition to womanhood.
Yet while an accomplished photographer, Toivanen is best described as a conceptual artist who uses photography as one means, in conjunction with countless others, of realizing her ideas. A recent series of "First Rite Games," for example, took form as seamless but subversive simulations of tabletop toys, from jigsaw puzzles to Viewmaster reels. Inserting her own seductive, tender, or darkly disturbing doll imagery in lieu of predictable graphics or fairy tale formulae, Toivanen exploited the potential of interactive play to directly and intimately engage viewers with the photographs and their subjects, and to provoke a reconsideration of the nature of the games themselves. Her ambitious, large-scale "Face to Face," a public art installation created for Avenue of the Arts 2002 in downtown Kansas City, likewise engaged passerby in play, transforming the street into an interactive arena and interjecting a striking human presence into the built environment. As if refusing to be repressed, Toivanenıs surprising, potent images continue to surface in a variety of situations, reminding us that things are not always what they seem and inviting us to look again.
This tactic of inserting unexpected imagery into appropriated formats is employed in several works in "Whirl." "Learnt Expressions" incorporates Toivanen's native Finnish language, which she applies to labeling a fantastic array of doll portraits in a poster that recalls a tool for teaching vocabulary. Using the portraits as signifiers for personality attributes or types, she smartly and humorously exposes the manner in which language, and our tools for teaching it, imply fixed definitions, necessitate oversimplification, and are laden with cultural values and judgments. Expanding the standard lexicon to include such characteristics as "disdainful" and "sullen," she playfully pokes fun at the lesson and the absurdity of reducing each image - each individual - to a single, translatable adjective. In a likewise manner, "Measuring Up," assumes the guise of a chart for determining a child's height. With images of dolls combined with a color progression from light pink to deep red illustrating incremental ages and stages of growth, the piece plays on our penchant for designating "normal" development and measuring ourselves against fixed, rigid standards. Further, it provokes a consideration of the assumed linear correspondence between age and appearance, and between physical and emotional maturity. In the end, the surreal dimensions and impossible proportions of the dolls themselves render their designations - and our evaluative criteria - patently absurd.
Toivanen's elegant reinvented croquet field, "Passageways," speaks more delicately of the process of growing up. Each wicket, veiled by a screen of diaphanous pink imagery, signifies purity yet intimates its loss: to play would be to tear through the shields, yielding irreparable damage. In this manner, Toivanen delivers a visceral sense of passage from innocence to knowing, with each wire wicket embodying the crossing of a threshold from one phase of life to another and the relinquishment of rose-colored visions that entails. By co-opting the format of a lawn game, she renders the concept of exposure all the more apparent, as private life becomes spectator sport.
In some cases Toivanen abandons photography altogether in favor of purely sculptural works. As if straight from a surreal nightmare, a "Skip-it" toy possesses the power to slice an ankle with a ring of sharp metal teeth, its red ball and string foreshadowing bloodstained socks and shoes and a rush to the emergency room for stitches. The glass tetherball of "Tethered" nearby threatens to shatter into a million knifelike shards if smacked, a potent embodiment of fragile youth. "Trust Suspended," a teeter-totter balanced precariously in midair, reminds us that our own fate is contingent upon the whim of a partner, who may either let us down gently, leave us stranded in air, or send us crashing to the ground with sudden force. Transforming the playground into a battleground, Toivanen makes anxiety - both of a child and a parent - palpable. But how can we play without getting hurt? What is a game with no risk involved? At a time when parents have the capacity to block television channels and internet sites in order to safeguard children from exposure to "adult" subject matter, these pieces remind us of far more immediate, mundane, and universal dangers and pains, virtually impossible to keep at bay.
Throughout "Whirl," circular forms and patterns allude to the cyclical structures and processes that govern our lives, as well as to the ongoing transference of lessons and patterns from one generation to the next. Toivanen's two videos, which anchor opposite ends of the exhibition, make particularly mesmerizing use of ceaseless, circular motion. At one pole is "Following Suit," comprising a rotating tableau of distorted images, in which references to acquired knowledge - a row of carefully practiced letter "a's", a diagrammatic series of dance steps - overlay more ambiguous imagery, seemingly emerging from the dark recesses of the imagination. As if picturing the very process of identity formation, as an individual accumulates, attempts to absorb, and struggles to reconcile incoming stimuli, influences, and societal expectations, the constantly churning, endlessly looping video projects a powerful vision of the psyche at work.
Yet these struggles are not without their joys, and "Twirling Girls" is something of a celebration. A sense of pure delight and physical release is captured in the painterly pink swirls and swiveling, swaying hula dance of the video's larger than life subjects. In this instance, the dolls seem less important as objects of childhood than as means of portraying states of mind. How many forms of amusement involve spinning to the point of dizziness? From merry-go-rounds to sit-n-spins, dozens of toys and amusement park rides are designed to deliver the exhilarating rush that comes from twirling in circles - an activity that makes us both intensely aware of our bodies and, at the same time, releases us into intoxicating states of confusion. The pleasures of such freedom, tinged with a sense of danger and imminent collapse, set us reeling again and again.
Kate Hackman
Curator