A nefarious nostalgia suffused Soup London’s Welcome To The Island Of Misfit Toys art exhibition. Take participating artist DaddyBears’ riffing off a previously condemned doll’s house with bulging baby-pink stuffing and flimsy hand-rendered embroidery.
Or Dean JF Hoy’s pensive band of Bears Who Care, which straddled the paradigm between the innocence of youth and the cynicism of adulthood by being mounted to the front grille of a Dodge pick-up. Both pieces undoubtedly make observers feel “Welcome to the island of misfit toys” as Emma Watson proclaims in the movie adaptation of Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being A Wallflower as she introduces Charlie — played by Logan Lerman — to their band of high-school outcasts.
Before Welcome To The Island Of Misfit Toys there was the stop-motion, animated world of Videocraft International’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer which was produced in 1964 and played around the concept of a location where spurned, scrapped or playthings determined defective could be exiled. The sympathy that this fictional island garnered prompted a one-time, spin-off TV feature in addition to an inundation of complementary merchandise. In spite of their differences, both memorabilia of popular culture have come to symbolise a space for those who believe they are excluded, discombobulated or othered by society.
It seems appropriate that an art show which depends on the cast-off would look to the cast out for a semblance of ingenuity, and this is something which shows itself more clearly than ever in the practices of the artists who encapsulate it. Dean JF Hoy, for instance, has a track record of taking disused soft toys from local charity businesses, city streets and virtual auction sites before revitalising them through a rehabilitation process.
“Invariably involving both the physical inversion of their plush form as well as a more figurative inversation of their capacity to offer care and comfort, Hoy’s pearl-teared teddies question the inherent loyalty and lifespan of our once preferred playthings” the press release points out.
Playing with this novelty further, Ted Le Swer’s vignettes of a nondescript white shirt and cotton vest serve as metaphors through which we can reveal and revere the monotony of our humdrum lives. Here, these articles of clothing have been reinterpreted through 3D rendering which creates an illusory process that makes them appear as if they are spewing throbbing blotches of artificial spores or concentrated constellations of artificial follicles.
Ultimately, they have grown from through the artist’s research into how ecological interactions between human and nonhuman entities form and expose themselves. Each of the short productions, which have been created underneath the title, ‘Not-Fresh’, stands as prying insights into our unavoidable mortality.
Exhibition took place at:
Soup London,
227 East Street
London, SE17 2SS
London based, future facing, arts and culture writer
