Tonia Di Risio  |  Homemade
October 23 - November 17, 01

Read the essay below by Leah Garnett

-Introduction-

Tonia Di Risio exhibited dollhouses made of a variety of constructed and collected materials. The dollhouses depict Italian-Canadian styles of domestic decoration, drawing on references from Di Risio's Italian grandmother's house. These houses become sites for examinations of language construction, such as the masculine and feminine formation of words. Video, audio and photographic components integrated into the design and fabrication of the dollhouses serve as ways to investigate the relationships of women to house, family, language and the transitions between generations.

This exhibition happened in conjunction with Photopolis, a city-wide festival of photography.

Grateful Acknowledgements go to the Sheila Hugh Mackay Foundation. 

HOMEMADE

Tonia Di Risio, in her research for Homemade, subscribed for one year to the magazines "Dollhouse Miniatures" and "Miniature Collector". These publications read like any home and garden magazine. They inform their public of new products, announce and review trade shows, feature 'showcase' homes, and provide DIY tips for home improvements. Alongside advertisements for furnishings and building materials, classifieds announce the auction of 'real estate'. While obviously useful to dollhouse enthusiasts, these magazines are decidedly odd to outside observers. Here is a realm of adult activity passionately devoted to the construction, decoration, and display of the ideal, albeit Lillipution, home.

I mention this pursuit namely as a point of contrast to what Di Risio is doing with her dollhouses. The three dollhouses that comprise Homemade are far from picture-perfect. Joints do not match; objects differ in scale and manufacture; and cut-out 'dolls' poise awkwardly in their surroundings. Unlike the idealized dollhouses built for display, Di Risio's constructions are working dollhouses. Prior to their installation for Homemade, these dollhouses served as sets for video animations in which the aforementioned cut-out dolls perform various cleaning activities. Di Risio's dollhouses are not seamless, nor are they static, and in this respect, they bear more resemblence to children's dollhouses than to the idyllic constructions featured in dollhouse magazines. However, I hesitate to liken Di Risio's engagement with her dollhouses strictly to the childhood pasttime of playing house. Childrens' dollhouses automatically flag gender issues concerning how girls learn and enact gendered roles and activities. Homemade certainly references these issues, but they are not the sole concern.

Rather, Di Risio's dollhouses discuss ethnicity, class, and gender, a large task for the miniature world. The three homes, inhabited by diminuative likenesses of Tonia, Tonia's mother, and Tonia's grandmother, represent three generations of Italian, middle-class homemakers and their homemaking. Representations of these identities can be seen in three main elements of the dollhouses: archways, styles of decoration, and the dolls' cleaning activities.

-Archways-

In her studio, Di Risio displays photographs of houses located in Toronto's Little Italy. Each house has a porch. The porches, composed of red, brick archways, have obviously been added onto the original wooden structures. As Tonia explained to me, working-class Italian immigrants who came to Canada in the 50's built these porches to reference modern, Italian, arched architecture made popular by fascism. By adding arches to their homes, immigrants indicated their success and increased prosperity. Simultaneously, by using distinctly Canadian materials to replicate a style fashionable in Italy, these homeowners signaled their 'Italianness' both to Canadians and to other immigrants. It's a discursive process which Di Risio has mimicked in her own dollhouses.

As Di Risio discovered, dollhouse kits are predominantly Victorian. If not Victorian, they are classic forms of New England architecture. The three dollhouses in Homemade are a Victorian, a Federal, and a Cape, all of which Di Risio renovated to make them look 'Italian'. From the Victorian, (which houses her grandmother), Tonia removed the gingerbread trim. She then modified the existing verandah by cutting archways into it. Following this, Di Risio added a brick facade to the entire dollhouse. Di Risio altered the Federal, (which her mother occupies), by turning square window openings into arched ones and by applying a brick facade. The Cape, (which Tonia lives in), looks most like the photographs in her studio. Di Risio renovated the exterior by adding an arched, brick porch that sits at the front of the clapboarded dollhouse. Ultimately, Di Risio's alterations to typically English and North American architecture make the Homemade dollhouses recognizably Canadian-Italian, thus establishing an ethnic identity for the dollhouses' occupants.

-Decoration-

Just as the exteriors of homes reflect their residents' personalities, so do the interiors. While preparing Homemade, Di Risio observed that her grandmother marked progression as a working-class immigrant to a middle-class immigrant through the objects in her home. Essentially, decoration defined aspects of her identity. With this in mind, Di Risio decorated each dollhouse in styles representative of her grandmother, her mother, and herself.

Reflecting her grandmother's actual collecting habits, Di Risio filled her grandmother's dollhouse with knick-knacks such as the gondola statue on the mantlepiece. Traditional wallpaper designs cover the walls while lace curtains hang in each window. Dark hardwood floors and wooden furniture sets create a staid atmosphere, though not so staid as not to entertain. The liquor cabinet attests to this. Christian iconography proliferates throughout the dollhouse: there are images of Mary in each room, a crucifix in the living room, and an oversized Bible in the bedroom. Together, these objects state that this is a middle-class, Italian, Catholic household.

Tonia's mother's dollhouse, with its large, lived-in backyard, (complete with patio, grape arbor, pruned mulberry trees, and a garden), appears as your standard, middle-class, suburban home. Although slightly more modern and visibly less Catholic, this dollhouse shares a similar style in decorating to the grandmother's. Collectibles, lace curtains, dark hardwood floors, simple crosses, and matching furniture decorate the rooms. The wallpaper designs, in a telling blend, are reproductions of the wallpaper in Tonia's grandmother's real home. The living room, with its pink furniture and crystal candy bowl, is also based on Tonia's grandmother's, not Tonia's mother's. This combination of decorative styles constructs a generational progression where Tonia's mother decorates somewhere in between her daughter's more contemporary aesthetic and her mother-in-law's more conservative style. This decorative collapse also suggests an intriguing ethnic adaption because Tonia's mother is, by birth, Austrian. And yet, the dollhouse representing her contains elements of her mother-in-law's Italian, middle-class home.

Tonia's dollhouse decoratively stands apart from the other two dollhouses. The furniture is a hodge-podge of styles. Instead of wallpaper, Tonia painted her walls with solid colors. Rather than mass-produced collectibles, Tonia filled her dollhouse with scaled versions of her friends' original artworks. There is no religious decoration. Unlike her mother's or grandmother's more traditional dollhouses, Tonia's has a modern office, furnished with a computer, fax machine, cordless phone, and a stereo system. Together, these elements define the home of a young, middle-class, culturally-educated professional. The only decorative links to Tonia's family are the lace doilies on the living room furniture, the lace bedspread, the cat figurine on the bedroom dresser, and as Tonia described it, the 'restaurant-Italian' cappuccino maker in the kitchen. This creeping of tradition and taste from grandmother to daughter-in-law and then to granddaughter constructs a lineage schooled in a progressive range of middle-class aesthetics.

-Dolls Cleaning-

Passing on traditions from older women to younger women has long been part of dollhouse history. In 18th century Germany, women used dollhouses as instructional tools to teach girls how to keep house. Di Risio's dollhouses do not teach viewers how to clean and maintain a home, but they do document how Di Risio learned to clean from her grandmother and mother.

In Homemade, the Tonia-doll cleans. The grandmother-doll and mother-doll stand in their respective houses and authoritatively direct the Tonia-doll's actions. In Tonia's dollhouse, both grandmother and mother join forces to supervise Tonia's possibly futile cleaning efforts. For while the grandmother's and mother's dollhouses appear quite tidy, Tonia's is less so. Dirty dishes fill the sink. Coffee cups sit on the tables. Piles of books and clothes litter the floor. Despite all of the Tonia-doll's training to clean her families' homes, she cannot clean her own. In this respect, the Tonia-doll represents a "failure" in gendered family traditions: when it comes down to being a "good" homemaker, the Tonia-doll just isn't that kind of girl. This "failure", of course, succeeds in building a new gender identity, one which eliminates the equation between women and good housekeeping. By separating the Tonia-doll from a traditional gender performance, Di Risio has not, however, issued a clean-cut indictment. The Tonia-doll still respects the grandmother and mother: she keeps trying to clean even though she knows that ultimately, she'll opt for a comfortably messy home. Consequently, the Tonia-doll does not obliterate or condemn tradition. Rather, she adds an alternative dimension to the future transference of generational knowledge.

As I mentioned earlier, Di Risio has 'played' with the Homemade dollhouses by using them as sets for video animations. During these animations, the grandmother and mother-dolls watch the Tonia-doll clean erratically scaled objects to polka music and to a voice-over of cleaning directives. Needless to say, it's a humorous scenario in which Di Risio obviously pokes kindly fun at her grandmother, her mother, and herself. Di Risio can 'play' with her families' identities because these dollhouses are wonky theatres, not fixed ideals. As theatres they offer a flexible arena in which Di Risio can document, renovate and refurbish. As a space of invention these dollhouses do not proffer didactic statements about what it means to be a Canadian, Italian, middle-class woman. Identities, although they have indisputable and informative histories, always have a malleable present.

- Leah Garnett, ©2001