Lissa Rivera

Portfolio: Incantations of a Doll Collector

Playing a role that is part voyeur, part anthropologist I stumbled upon something that seemed indefinable. I discovered a category of Internet users who have created identities literally akin to dolls. Oftentimes they wear flesh colored full body suits with female faces made out of plastic composite, latex or rubber. Due to the constricting nature of these masks, they can barely open their mouths, and at times have difficulties moving or breathing. The films they produce of themselves are mundane and usually not overtly sexual. They simply use their web cam as a mirror while they silently adjust their wigs and gaze at their plastic form. In the controlled space of my studio I re-arranged and collected documents of these practices, I researched the origins of how they might have been interpreted before the Internet and investigated how such abnormalities could have manifested. I looked for specimens that possessed a quintessential quality of the uncanny. Once segregated from their more secondary neighbors, they were recorded and placed on display within the wunderkammer-like office I have constructed as a laboratory to dissect and understand their meaning. Using techniques employed by traditional display to preserve and formulate the objects within my collection, viewers are invited to peruse photographs and video in vitrines in the likeness of natural history repositories or period room exhibits. Low-quality videos mined from YouTube were given new authority once framed in cherry and incased in glass. My office serves as an apparatus (or a mask) which grants access to the exploration of the sexual desire and identity. The images that I display illustrate the simultaneous destruction and construction of the self that occurs in the collection of images that constitute online identity. For my installation, it is important for the character created by the room to be mutable. Although the space itself becomes a device for analysis, I do not want it to be didactic in regards to the interpretation it produces. One of the most valuable things I have gained from this investigation is that identity itself is an anomaly. It is fascinating how after following this subject for over a year I have not yet unlocked the motives of the users, as they are too complicated to be reduced to language. Even my own interest remains furtive and ambiguous. They are perverts, hobbyists, children, teenagers, the elderly, they are no one, a death mask and they are myself, or perhaps a hallucination.