Tiffany ☘︎ Duong

Into the Dollhouse

Into the Dollhouse explores the patriarchal conditions that impact the artist's experience of womanhood, centering on the suppression of socially unacceptable behaviours and emotions that lead to a disconnect with the self. With Barbie as a vessel for the artist's consciousness, Tiffany merges hyperbolic examples of pretend play scenarios and pop culture with the physiological, spiritual, and societal laws of a naturalistic reality - blurring the boundaries between reality and the inconsequential, imaginary nature of play. This is further reflected through the depictions of Barbie's inbetween-ness: inanimate as a toy, alive as a pop culture icon, and idolized as a vision of colonial and patriarchal fantasy.

Using a mixed-media approach, Tiffany creates small-scale works that fuse playful drawing modes with refined painting techniques to invoke childhood feelings of curiosity and subvert the colonial history of Western realist portraiture. Each painting loosely represents a room of a dollhouse, exploring the sociopolitical, gendered, and cultural dynamics specific to the room and Tiffany’s existence. Simultaneously, the paintings operate as portals into the anger, violence, and impulses of her psyche. As such, the wooden panels reflect the materiality of a dollhouse whilst the use of acrylic paint relates to Barbie’s synthetic, plastic nature.