Colin H. Smith: "Creepy Cuteness" Saint John Times Globe. September 23, 1999

CREEPY CUTENESS:
Mitch Robertson's exhibit offers a commentary on our obsession with fame and wealth

According to Mitch Robertson's guest book, his Famous™ portraits show at Judith Mackin's "The Space" gallery on Canterbury Street has not been a well-visited art event.

Too bad. Robertson's offering is a humorously political commentary on today's society that asks, among other things, the question, "Does 15 minutes of fame include commercial breaks?" It challenges the viewer to explore the uneasy relationship between art and the fame, beauty, wealth, and marketing which drive its commerce.

Robertson, an energetic Toronto-based twenty-something whose work has recently been exhibited in galleries in Moncton, Ottawa and Northern Ireland, clearly loves to play with the contradictions and tensions that result from the clash between high art and popular culture, and the market-driven and the creative. He challenges our objective and subjective responses by presenting a satirical and paradoxical commentary that deconstructs certain aspects of our consumer-driven society while not condemning it.

In a recent interview published in SEE Magazine, Robertson said his aim was to get the viewer to explore these dichotomies in an attempt to explain why our society desires such constructions. His main interest is "to explore our obsession with fame, wealth and collectibles."

On entering the airy gallery, the viewer is greeted by a series of 10 large (36" x 48") canvasses featuring laser-printed images of dolls - blown-up reproductions of actual collector doll advertisements - on gilded backgrounds, discreetly framed, and hung with the reverence usually accorded to fine art. The tacky, sentimental, oversized porcelain heads, with huge lambent eyes and saccharine slogans, are the kind of dolls offered to "serious" collectors by companies such as the Franklin Mint and similar collectible marketing companies.

Robertson places at the bottom corner of each canvas an enlarged order form - complete with the necessary phone numbers - so that the viewer can purchase one of the precious and somewhat creepy dolls that he has parodied.

One of the questions that Robertson's work raises is why "collector" dolls are commodities treated as objects of value in our society. Well, for one thing, dolls - unlike real children - never grow up. They demand nothing of us. Could this explain their popularity?

Robertson implies that Western manufacturing relates to the hyping of brand names rather than marketing quality goods, and is not flattering the companies that produce mail-order collectible dolls, he maintains that his intention is not to try to change people's view of these products. Rather, he makes a satirical statement about both the dark side of toy ancestry (the Brothers Grimm, for instance) and the sentimental impulses that drive our consumer-oriented society.

As Robertson points out, "Buy Sell Trade. Obsessions with fame, beauty, wealth, and collectibles. We are all part of it. I just want to make you aware."

As for fame and its price, five 'portraits' of Diana hang in another part of the gallery. These smaller 8"x lO" works - in this case not enlarged - are magazine images of the late Princess of Wales, and are, significantly perhaps, surrounded by artificial gold leaf.

In the doll images, early childhood is depicted through exaggeratedly "adorable" features such as chubby cheeks, dimples and large eyes. Here, Diana is portrayed in a cloying, impossibly sweet beauty that is at odds with the gruesome end of her life, further suggesting that physical beauty is transitory while the cost of fame and wealth can be a high one.

All of the pieces in Robertson's show lead to provocative questions:

Does art have the power to reveal what was previously unseen? Can the artist make what was always seen be seen in a new way?

Clearly, Robertson has taken the image of the mass-produced - the magazine advertisement, the "collectible" doll manufactured in countless thousands - and combined them to make original art. While the artist is the first to agree that his work questions the value of fame ("it's what my work is all about," he recently said), the contradiction is that recent acquisitions of his work by the Art Gallery of Ontario's E. P. Taylor Research Library and the National Gallery's Art Metropole Archive will ensure it for him personally. 

- Colin H. Smith