Are You Afraid of the Dolls?

Recently I have posted some doll-related images in my Facebook feed (e.g., Barbie doll head gumball dispenser or the jewelry of Margaux Lange), and my friends who commented reacted either with "That is so cool, I want it!" or "That is so creepy, I wish I could unsee it!" So that was the inspiration for this Ten Two Studios Halloween challenge, my altered Altoid tin Little Shrine of Horrors using a lovely selection of dark and creepy images:
 

So when it comes to creepy dolls, do you fall into the category of "Want them!" or "Make them go away!"??? Feel free to leave a comment below!

If you love creepy dolls, check out the blog of my friend Gary Warren Niebuhr and his Flickr gallery of his mixed media sculptures. Or the studio space of my friend Jessica Poor who has amassed quite the collection of dolls & doll heads to use in her art.

And I recommend the documentary "Of Dolls and Murder" about miniature crime scenes made in the 1930s & 1940s that are still being used to train police detectives.

Beware of the Dolls....

And while I'm plugging APA women filmmakers...

I realized that a sub-theme in my last post was documentaries by Asian-American/Asian-Canadian women, so I'll mention another documentary that I just watched in my usual short installments (DVR'd from Sundance Channel): The Grace Lee Project, in which filmmaker Grace Lee wonders why there are so many women with her name and goes in search of them.

Similar to Are You Dave Gorman? in theme if not hilarity.

So far I have not actually met anyone with my name, but I know there are plenty of them out there.

----Just had to update this to note one of Grace Lee's other movies American Zombie - there's one I have to see (though can it live up to my Shaun of the Dead expectations?)

Henry Darger is everywhere!

I will admit that I was unfamiliar with Henry Darger, though I am sure I had seen images of his work before I went to the Messages and Magic show at the Kohler Art Center last week.

Then this weekend I saw Jessica Yu's fascinating documentary Protagonist on our digital cable's "free movies on demand" channel, and had to look her up on IMDb, where I found she had previously made a documentary about Darger, In the Realms of the Unreal. So now I'm waiting to get that DVD through interlibrary loan.

And then in last night's episode of The Simpsons, Lisa and her new best friend visit the Folk Art Museum where you can see Henry Darger's art hanging on a wall in the background, including "Spangled Blengins" (above), which I had just seen at the Kohler. (Lisa also stopped to look at some Joseph Cornell shadow boxes, so I'm sure there are a lot of other real artists represented in that one brief scene, and someone somewhere on the interweb will analyze this is great detail.)

On a side note: Protagonist explores Euripidean dramatic structure through the life stories of four different modern men and is much more riveting than that sounds and also visually interesting because of a Greek chorus of puppets (not as cheesy as it sounds but some reviewers apparently found them distracting) and animated title cards for each section inspired by ancient Greek art. This in turn reminded me of another documentary that I recommend to everyone: Anne Marie Fleming's The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam. (There's a book too, but the movie came first and is much more fun to watch.)