Sara Rytteke: You're Such a Doll

Sara Rytteke: You’re Such a Doll

We live in a visual culture where we are constantly bombarded with images,
sound bites and short and incomplete information from our daily paper, to
magazines, TV, movies, the Internet and even toys. How do we navigate the
information heavy and often incomplete world? Does the information
change how we construct our identity? Is who we are the same as it was
after the influence of our culture?

The notion that photography seemingly tells truths or represents reality is
flawed, although we know that not everything we see is real or truth, we
often forget to examine visual materials for their true content. In my work, I
examine and interpret visually how the values of popular culture–especially
women’s magazines, fashion and toys–play a part in our lives. By styling an
ordinary looking woman (in this case myself) and making her into a doll, I
hope to challenge the idea of the beauty as perfection as well as the
shallow portrayal of identity.

Our earliest influences are the toys we play with, which brought me to the
influences from my childhood, namely paper dolls and Barbies. I am
interested in what the dolls represent as re-presentations of humans/women
and in terms of toys, since they are our earliest role models outside our
immediate world. I am examining the roles, through representative clothes,
of females today and in the past. To date I have made dolls representing
decades from the 1920s through the 2000s, as well as a futuristic version.