Toy-filled exhibit recalls joys, loss of childhood

You might feel like a kid when you check out the new show at the Art Gallery of St. Albert. A giant doll occupies a sizable portion of the open exhibit space on the main floor, making you want to be young again and just play with toys to fill your days.

This is all a trick to get you into the right headspace. Pretty soon, you will fall victim to Saskatchewan-based artist Heather Benning’s ulterior motive: to bring you to tears. It’s all a big psychological ploy to emotionally revert her audience back to a time when they struggled with abandonment issues.

“I like it to definitely have a playfulness to it because you don’t want to just send out a load of depressing work into the world,” she laughs. “I think that it’s good if there’s something to smile about but then there’s also a loss.”

Dollhouse is actually an abandoned farmhouse that she renovated — dolled up, so to speak — and converted into a life-sized version of a child’s toy. She removed the entire back wall and encased it in plexiglass to complete the effect. You peer into this pristine world with a sense of wonder before the emptiness hits you. You then realize you’ve lost your childhood forever.

Field Doll does much the same thing. Benning has created a 3.6-metre-long (12-ft.) doll and photographed it in various locations like a misplaced toy. We’ve all done it before with our own dolls or cherished items so we all know that pang of losing a part of ourselves when it happens. Now, that feeling is magnified by the sheer enormity of the ‘lost’ object itself.

At first it comes across as a novelty like Ron Mueck's gigantic newborn baby sculpture called A Girl that appeared two years ago at the Art Gallery of Alberta. Both that and this work are fascinating and disturbing in their own ways. Here, the observers are the puppets as the artist plays with our moods and feelings, tempting us with giddy joy and then turning it right on its head.

“There’s a mourning process.”

Accompanying the doll and the photos of the dollhouse is a kinetic sculpture of a tricycle overturned in a pile of gravel, its rear wheel endlessly spinning thanks to a hidden motor. Look closer and you’ll see that it’s probably 40 to 50 years old and there’s a large chunk of the rubber that is missing from the front tire.

“It’s really just about the fast/stop movement of play,” Benning says. “You just get off the tricycle, you throw it down and the wheel is still turning a bit. But then the eeriness of it … it’s a dead bike that’s been left for quite some time.”

Be prepared to reflect on your lost youth as you step through the gallery doors for the next month, kids.