Welcome to The Dollhouse: Step inside the surreal mind of artist Marnie Weber at LAM
By MARRIE STONE
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Photo by Jeff Rovner
A surrealistic photograph of multidisciplinary artist Marnie Weber with “The Dollhouse.” The house, and its 11 accompanying collages, are on display for the first time in its entirety through September 1.
Albert Einstein once said, “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” Fairy tales, he reasoned, expand the imagination – a key ingredient of the scientific mind.
Psychologists, literary scholars, academics and artists have all extolled the power of fairy tales. Set in worlds that look familiar to our own, fairy tales exist outside of space and time. Their rules operate a little differently. Children inhabit fantastical environs – palaces made of ice or beds that float like boats. Animals talk and play musical instruments. Adults either don’t exist or are mostly absent.
Fairy tales give children safe spaces to explore dark ideas and grapple with the strangeness and scariness of the world. For adults, they’re portals back in time to reconnect with those playful parts of ourselves that age wears down.
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Photo by Jeff Rovner
A father and son explore the interior of the 11-room dollhouse, which is part of LAM’s permanent collection
Welcome to multidisciplinary artist Marnie Weber’s The Dollhouse. Constructed over a nearly two-year period in 2002, the six-foot by 10-foot Gaudi-esque house contains 11 rooms, each one offering a distinct and supernatural reality. Accompanying the structure are 11 corresponding collages using photographs of each room as their backdrop.
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Photo by Jeff Rovner
“The Snow Room” as it appears inside “The Dollhouse” (left) and The Snow Room collaged (right)
Imbued with symbolism and metaphor, young girls interact with animals in a variety of elaborate set pieces as older women (most of whom appear stern and judgmental) look on through the windows and mirrors. Viewers can choose their own emotional adventure as the landscapes and storylines change from room to room. Bats with women’s faces hang from the “Whispering Cave.” Girls carry animal heads like musical instruments as a bear busts out piano tunes in “Concert for Those Who Have Gone.”
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Courtesy of LAM
“Concert for Those Who Have Gone,” a collage based on one of the 11 rooms inside “The Dollhouse”
Now through September 1, the Laguna Art Museum (LAM) invites visitors to explore both Weber’s haunting and mysterious mind and their own. Because, as Jungian psychologists will tell you, fairy tales represent the simplest and purest forms of universal archetypes. Weber has left plenty of room for us to write our own stories onto the worlds she’s built.
“When you walk into a scene and there’s something discomforting about it, or [it feels like] the opening of a story without any answers, then you insert yourself and figure out what’s going on,” Weber said. “The greatest benefit of surrealism is the ability for people to insert themselves. The uncanny space in between things is where the audience can step in.”
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Even Weber seems to have discovered new insights about herself inside the work over time. “I’m so caught up in creating the characters and stories, I had never thought of the dollhouse as a form of self-expression, which seems odd for an artist, but it’s true,” Weber said. “I [recently] started thinking about the different rooms and, yeah, there is a very autobiographical component to the work.” “The Forever Room,” for example, contains ancient Chinese art and artifacts. Weber lived in Asia for a year as a child where her father worked as an Asian art historian, specializing in Chinese bronzes. Music and animals play enormous roles in Weber’s life (she founded the now-defunct band Spirit Girls). Both elements appear frequently through the dollhouse.
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Courtesy of LAM
“The Forever Room” harkens back to Weber’s time in Asia and her father’s work as an Asian art historian
The project began when Weber’s daughter was about 4 years old, playing with figurines and inventing storylines. “When you’re a child, there are no rules or boundaries. Anything goes,” Weber said. “She would have a mouse dressing up as a bride and marrying a dog. I thought it would be fun to do that with the house, bringing in nature and animals to allow these little girls to live in their own world.”
The “little girls,” though, often have adult-looking faces. They’re pieced together using 2002 technology – magazine cut-outs printed at Kinko’s and glued together by hand. The effect is A.I.-esque, with the proportions and expressions feeling a little…odd. That enhances the effect of this other-worldly reality Weber sought to create. We wonder whether the women on the other side of the glass are mother figures or simply the adult versions of girls in the room. Either way, there’s no way for them to communicate, caught on opposite sides of the looking glass.
“When you see an adult looking through a window, it’s the attempt to grasp back at your childhood and imagination,” Weber said. “It serves as a reminder of the freedom we felt as children.”
We’re also made to wonder whether these are different and discrete scenes, or simply chambers of a single woman’s mind, reinforced by the fact that the exterior of the dollhouse is shaped like a woman’s sad face. Weber confesses it could all be pieces of her.
Inspired in part by both the Madonna Inn and Walt Disney, Weber used a variety of materials (vinyl flooring, foam, resin, wallpaper, etc.) to create a faux world that straddles reality and imagination. The architecture itself lends to the fairytale feel of the dollhouse. “The sense of play also comes into the materials that I used,” Weber said. “I wanted to create a sense that anything can go with any material, and it’s not super serious.”
Fairy tales don’t always have happy endings, and neither do Weber’s theatrical sets. Emotions run the gamut, with the ambience setting the tone. There are seasons – “The Fall Room” (with its dead leaves and abundant birds) and “The Snow Room” (with its icy trees and friendly snowmen accompanied by a girl shivering in her bed). There are tales of female empowerment – “The Trophy Room” showcases a girl defending a deer from the fate that awaits it. There are cautionary tales – a bear delivering a boatload of childhood dolls to a teenage girl trying to grow up.
“If there’s one message to get across, it’s to not grow old,” Weber said.
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Courtesy of LAM
“The Whispering Cave” features a bear delivering a boatload of childhood dolls to a teenage girl dressing older than her years
More interesting, perhaps, is seeing how the work has aged in the 23 years since it was created. Rising water and frozen rooms might be interpreted as commentaries on climate change, but that likely wasn’t on Weber’s mind in 2002. Her surreal creations read differently in a world threatened by A.I. than they did when created at Kinkos.
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Courtesy of LAM
“The Voyage”
For Weber, whose talents stretch from theater and costuming to music and performance art, all the world’s a stage. She’s created the scenes and invites you to step inside. You might be surprised by what you discover.
LAM plans to offer a variety of programming around the dollhouse for adults and children alike. Watch their website here for more details. For more information about Weber and her extensive body of work, visit her website here. Her videography (here) will give you a sense for how Weber combines sound, imagery and movement in her films to create complete worlds.
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Photo by Jeff Rovner
“The Dollhouse” will appeal to children and adults alike
