“Dollhaus: Reimagining the Domestic Space” opened in the Barry Art Museum on Aug. 27. Museum-goers ventured upstairs to Gallery 3 to view a work of art created by 16 ODU faculty members.
The Barry Art Museum is known for its doll collection and showcases. “Dollhaus” is a clear love letter to the art of the dollhouse, a medium that the museum takes care to highlight and showcase year-round.
According to Sara Woodbury, art curator at the Barry Art Museum, “Dollhaus” is an exhibit several years in the making. The museum initially wanted to display historical dollhouses, but the concept was reimagined to focus on ODU faculty while doing studio visits for “Message in a Bottle,” the museum’s maritime history-focused exhibition.
“It was a really fun opportunity to put a contemporary spin on the show by showing how different artists would interpret it,” said Woodbury. “It completely redirected the focus away from a retrospective to a look at what’s happening right now in the world of art, right here on campus.”
Each artist received a box to design and create a room in, and the completed boxes were assembled in a dollhouse framework before being put up for display in the museum. Each box is eye-catching; no two rooms are quite the same. The artists were given free rein to design whatever they wanted.
“The sky was the limit,” said Woodbury.
The room created by Woody Robinson, the Director of Theatre Facilities, was a workshop that included a depiction of him creating a miniature set design of “Women of Troy,” a production previously put on by ODURep. The workshop is filled with tools, and miniature posters of various productions Robinson worked on decorate the walls.
“As a miniaturist, I thought if I’m making a dollhouse room, it would be cool to make a dream workshop for myself. That was my inspiration,” said Robinson.
Robinson used scrap wood to build his room. He creatively used wooden skewers to fashion little tools, a circuit board for a pegboard and domed bottoms of Red Bull cans to build miniature ceiling lights to create the industrial look he wanted.
“Everything’s made out of weird little parts,” Robinson laughed.
Heather Beardsley, an adjunct professor of art at ODU, subverted the themes of domesticity when creating a room lined with vines and yellow wallpaper inspired by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a well-known early work of American feminist literature that delved into the horrors of the “rest cure” commonly prescribed to women in the 19th century.
“Dollhouses are so rooted in domesticity and the resting cure feels very related to that idea that being at home and not having an occupation outside of the home is supposed to be healing,” said Beardsley. “But, for a lot of people, that’s not necessarily the case.”
Beardsley created custom wallpaper for the room, with floral embroidery and Victorian women hidden behind the flowers, and a wirework of vines creeping all over the room. She describes the aesthetic of her work as “plants growing over manmade structures and places,” so tying it to additional inspiration from “The Yellow Wallpaper” further tied her work to the theme of reimagining the domestic space.
Peter Eudenbach, a professor of art at ODU, described his room as “an anti-camera that protrudes into the room” where the window of the dollhouse would have been. He mounted an antique camera on the back wall and lined the floor with a cyanotype, a method of photographic processing that does not use a camera.
If a viewer looks into the camera, they are met with a close-up image of “Sputnik,” a sculpture created by Eudenbach in 1999 and currently on display in Gallery 4 of the Barry Art Museum.
“I just thought, since you can look into the camera, it’d be nice to have something [you] could see when you look in,” said Eudenbach.
According to Woodbury, there were not as many complications as she anticipated when putting the finished work together. They had to work around the artists’ schedules, as well as setting up some additional lighting in the exhibit.
“The biggest challenge was just making sure it was sufficiently lit in a way that did justice to each artist’s work,” said Woodbury.
“Dollhaus” has been on display for the entirety of the fall 2024 semester.
Speaking on the fixation on dollhouses, Woodbury said, “I feel dollhouses play into a larger fascination with anything that plays with our sense of scale. Things that are either really small and you can get really lost in their details. […] Having that injects a sense of wonder, I think, back into our lived experience.”
The Dollhaus is indeed quite a wonder to behold, especially with the artistic chaos of the differing aesthetics and interpretations of domestic themes. Looking closely at even a single room, a viewer can pinpoint tons of small details that make the project memorable.
“It was a fun project, definitely, and fun to see everyone else’s take on it,” said Eudenbach.
According to Woodbury, there are no definitive plans for the exhibition after it ends.
“Whatever becomes of the doll boxes will be a discussion between the artists and the museum. We want to make sure we follow their intent,” she said.
“Dollhaus: Reimagining the Domestic Space” was on display from Aug. 27, 2024 and will be available to the public until Jan 5. 2025.
This story was originally published in the Mace and Crown’s Fall 2024 magazine.
