(Dolls Triptych)
Anonymous
Found 03/2012, Texas Thrift (I35 and 51st)

To look into a doll’s eyes is to throw a pebble into the Uncanny Valley. The three pieces of Dolls Triptych explore the interactions between human and doll, three emotional connections, all unsettling.

The meticulous eyelashes and wide, staring gaze of the first of the three pieces give the first doll a manic intensity, enhancing the fundamentally unnatural nature of the doll by underlining the tension between the energy of the doll’s stare and the inanimate nature of its existence. It is wearing what seems to be a baptismal gown, but the alertness of its stare, its ambitiously Texas-sized bouffant, and its excessive eyeliner and dilated stare seem to be from an older creature, one exposed to and perhaps seeking delights well beyond its apparent age.

The second seems the most comfortable with its dollness and subjective age, wearing its baptismal gown perhaps not with the peace of an innocent, but the benign acceptance of a diminutive preadolescent. The unsettling aspect of the second image is in the contrast between its innocent face and baptismal array, and the ancient, cronelike hands, seemly spliced into the child as a perverse suggestion of how age and mortality even comes to the inanimate.

The third portrait is perhaps of the most technically perfect of the three dolls, without any deep sustaining flaw, save that its facial features are perhaps a bit small for its generous cheeks and contour.  In that, however, it falls the greatest distance into the treacherous rift of the Uncanny Valley, those things that most strive to be human inevitably seem the most alien.