Category Archives: Mannequins

Unica Zürn: “Here is the doll …”

In a recent dream, a man who looked very, very old … hundreds of years old … said to me: “Hey, dollface.” I love the word, and I knew something was about to be born of this word, from noticing the connotative beauty of it. This is a loaded word. Dollface. The word conjures the […]

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Hans Bellmer’s 110th Birthday Today

I don’t clearly recall the first time I discovered the artist, Hans Bellmer, but I believe, hazily, that it was in a women’s studies class while I worked on my Master of Fine Arts in poetry. I do recall becoming completely taken with him: imagining him alive, imagining him living daily life as a man, […]

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Little-Known Lester Gaba and His Gal

In 1932, Lester Gaba said he packed “a clean shirt and one of my soap sculptures” and headed from Chicago to New York City. He would become a little-known sculptor, seeming to be known and famous only during his own time after he created mannequins for the likes of Saks Fifth Avenue in 1930s New […]

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Mannequins are Adult-Sized Dolls

The wonderfully creepy Twilight Zone episode, “After Hours” is a visual manifestation of something I have thought about often, surrealistically. I have always wondered about inanimates left alone, left to their own devices.  I know this is odd and I know intellectually that inanimates do not come to life, but it is still something my […]

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