“P-Town Babies” at AMP, Provincetown MA 2018

Thedra Cullar-Ledford
“P-Town Babies”
AMP Provinicetown, MA
September – October, 2018

 Doll Parts by Courtney Love

“I am doll eyes, doll mouth, doll legs
I am doll arms, big veins, dog bait
Yeah, they really want you
They really want you, they really do
Yeah, they really want you
They really want you, and I do too”

I looked at her. Barbie’s eyes were sparkling blue like the ocean on a good day. I looked and in a moment noticed she had the whole world, the cosmos, drawn in makeup above and below her eyes. An entire galaxy, clouds, stars, a sun, the sea, painted onto her face. Yellow, blue, pink, and a million silver sparkles.

We sat looking at each other, looking and talking and then not talking and looking again. It was a stop-and-start thing with both of us constantly saying the wrong thing, saying anything, and then immediately regretting having said it.

It was obvious Barbie didn’t trust me. I asked her if she wanted something to drink.

“Diet Coke,” she said. And I wondered why I’d asked.

I went into the house, upstairs into my parents’ bath-room, opened the medicine cabinet, and got a couple of Valiums. I immediately swallowed one. I figured if I could be calm and collected, she’d realize I wasn’t going to hurt her. I broke another Valium into a million small pieces, dropped some slivers into Barbie’s Diet Coke, and swished it around so it’d blend. I figured if we could be calm and collected together, she’d be able to trust me even sooner. I was falling in love in a way that had nothing to do with love.”

AM Homes “A Real Doll”
from The Safety of Objects

The Quality of Dollishness By Bill Arning, from the catalog

The universal desire to do bad things to dolls, and conversely to understand oneself as an abused doll when bad things are happening to us is hard to admit. Thedra Cullar-Ledford has employed the quality of dollishness throughout her career, and she has also made a trademark of holding things up to the light of day that most artists would hide from public attention. Combine these for the P-town Baby series and few viewers won’t both laugh and feel guilty for laughing afterwards.

In an era where the puritans have taken over, pretending to be progressives, it’s tempting to admit to seeing these dolls in their individual grimaces, dismemberings and sexual postures as anything other than tragic victims but, as a wise woman told me, no one has correct fantasies and second guessing one’s desires leads only to dishonesty.

I had a full-on romance with my GI Joe doll, and no, he did not give me verbal consent. He might be the first man to break my heart too as I knew I would always play second fiddle to Barbie. “Fuck her” my eight year old brain tried to formulate those words. This was the same period when I was erotically obsessed by the close quarters on some forgotten TV show about a submarine crew and remember asking my mom why I could not invite the sailors to my birthday party. I started down the path of perversity young.

Despite my desire to treat Thedra Cullar-Ledford and her art as an honorary gay male, and her homoerotic male doll couplings as a projection of my own desires she is very much a cis-gendered woman and the type of Bad Girl Feminist artist that I love like Minter, Yuskavage, and Walker.

I am aware that these paintings construct meaning very differently when you know she is also a mom who raised her sons with an admirable freedom to be themselves. My discomfort level rises sharply when she paints dolls based on people of color, and ashamed that I see race first and get tongue-tied discussing them, and yet even my discomfort is educational; The satanic and punk rock dolls land me back in my comfort zone.

These little round paintings, while lusciously painted, serve as small circular mirrors. As I consider each I learn where and how I am conformable, where I am amused and where I am shocked. The dolls serve as synecdoche for the fraught identity landscapes made more tense while living collectively under a misogynistic tyrant’s White House. I am sure that a few viewers will wander into the gallery and get royally pissed off by an artist who conjures the uncomfortable truths of the human mind without giving them an “out”, a place to proclaim the healthiness of their own fantasy lives. That is good because only boring artists make no one angry.