art

VALLEY OF THE DOLLS

DOLL ARTIST KRISTIN VICTORIA BARRON MAKES CREATURES SO BEAUTIFUL AND CREEPY THEY COULD ONLY COME DIRECTLY FROM HER DREAMS

A slight woman with a windswept mane of dark hair and a large swaddled bundle in her arms ducks into the café ahead of you. It is 1: 15 p.m. on the dot, but this turns out not to be the woman you have come out to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to meet on a blustery December day. No, it turns out that the package this woman carries contains an actual infant—vaguely doll-sized, yes, but unmistakably alive. But what about the luminous wide-eyed creature with the corona of platinum hair who slips in the door right be-

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hind you? Is the woman who signs her e-mails “fig pâté and rubber treads” or “Phileas Fogg and no whammies, no whammies....” and who, after four (or was it five?) aborted attempts to meet has come to think of you not as the annoying, unreliable writer who can’t get her shit together but rather as a unicorn—a mythological beast who simply requires a bit of gentle coaxing. You wonder if maybe you made her up out of thin air and not the other way around.

Kristin Victoria Barron has a masters in interior design. She does some styling on the side and is currently working on a line of men’s accessories with a friend. But her true calling is dolls. The bundle she pulls from her bag seems no less alive than the aforementioned infant, though very odd looking and perhaps better behaved. “This is the bird-breasted thrasher,” Barron explains as she unwraps the quilted blanket, unfolds the doll’s lanky arms and legs, and unbandages his delicate porcelain hands and feet. He is wearing a trench coat (appropriate for a flasher, you suppose) and a conical hat that looks vaguely religious. His chest is feathered like a bird’s. A smeary black streak down the center of his porcelain face might be a blessing but could also indicate where a beak used to sit. There is something both lovely and sinister about this indeterminate little being. He appears to have fallen here from a fairy tale, but a fairy tale that probably didn’t end well, and the moral of which came with a very heavy price.

How Barron came to make dolls is a tale all its own that winds its way through art school in Kansas City in the late ’90s; six endless months of drawing nothing but bricks (a form of mild torture for a young artist eager to explore the world); a Jungian analyst; a nearly 5-foot-tall disembodied porcelain head that she created in

her own image, no less, and that now resides in a private garden in Kansas; a childhood memory; a trip to Paris; and a dream. It is this last incarnation—her vivid dream world—that has inspired many of the dolls in her collection.

Barron reckons she has made about twenty dolls thus far. “For a while they were all in my apartment at once,” she says. “It was like there were just too many people living there. I had to put some of them in storage.” What with the firing of the porcelain extremities, the sewing of the bodies and clothes, and the incessant tinkering to which Barron is constantly prey, each doll can take countless hours to complete. Though there is some question as to whether the dolls are ever, in fact, finished. “They are always in a state of becoming,” she says. She would like, in fact, to animate them, and has already started experimenting with short films, in which she can further explore their characters. The dolls she can bear to part with are for sale (or depending on how you look at it, adoption) at stores like The Future Perfect in Brooklyn. A pair of genderless, chicken-footed twins is there now, waiting for the right soul to claim them. There has been some talk about how one twin is better looking than the other, but Barron doesn’t want them to be separated. “It’s kind of heartbreaking,” the 27- year-old says. “But such is life.” Life?, you ask yourself. But apparently fantasy is not without its discontents. Alix Browne

Artwork Kristen Victoria Barron

Photography Taea Thale

For information: www.kriest.com