OFLUXO
Review: Abby Lloyd “Goodbye Dolly”,
Alyssa Davis Gallery 2022
IN A GALLERY HIGH ABOVE MANHATTAN’S SKYLINE ARTIST/ CURATOR ABBY LLOYD’S SUPER-SIZED RAG DOLL HAUNTINGLY WAITS WITH ENOUGH HEART TO ABSORB OUR COLLECTIVE TRAUMA
– By Li E Ke, January 26, 2022
Being locked-in for a third COVID-round during the Omicron zombie pause post-holidays put me in a strange existential funk. Not to mention, a disquieting general uneasiness involving just about every nook, corner and cranny of adult-life. It’s as if nothing makes sense at all, nor has a meaningful base center of orientation. What would normally be comforting and well-anchored in the world proper, is in a seemingly frozen static-state. The world inside-out is in a rather darkened dream – a death-drop to uncertainty.
When I received an invitation from Alyssa Davis (of Alyssa Davis Gallery) for an early aperitif and gallery visit, it was a welcoming surprise. However, this invite came along with some unsettling news, Alyssa texted: “Abby Lloyd’s Goodbye Dolly is our last show”.
Alyssa Davis Gallery is located at 2 Cornelia Street, inside The Varitype Building, an unlikely location, I think. I have been a de-facto “private member” of the gallery, along with a small odd circle of folks, since it opened in 2016. The first show Hard Times, What?, was a solo featuring artist Emma McMillan, organized by a Moscow based curator Ilya Smirnov – who I recognized from my hardcore years in Vienna, Austria.
There has always been a slight Viennese-feeling with the shows at Alyssa Davis Gallery. For six years Davis has operated an alternative kind of space outside the traditional gallery market. Davis’ cabinet of curiosities forensic approach to art exhibitions has always had a type of Darwinian DNA. With each show Davis brushes-back layers of human conditions, revealing new sediment – both personal and beyond.
Is Davis a forensic biologist studying the bodily fluids, remains and bones of contemporary art, or is she an anthropologist? There is an uncanny science and chemistry behind the show’s modus-operandi and her careful yet finely-tuned relations with the artists selected to showcase work.
The gallery is a site of criminal investigation.. or perhaps a collection of rare species of realities.. collected and exhibited like butterflies.
After signing in to the gallery’s lobby, I head to the elevator. Memories of summer rooftop gatherings come to mind. I enter the small crowded elevator with some anxious-talkative tenants mumbling through their masks. I get off on the 11th floor and walk to Alyssa’s door, which is slightly open. I enter the space. Alyssa isn’t anywhere to be found. I hear a low demonic-murmur of Russian techno bass-pulses emanating from unusually high-quality speakers. At first, the space seems completely empty. No paintings on the walls, the salon of the gallery is stripped bare to its architectural bones, with the exception of appropriately placed furniture that reminds me of the lounge in director Tad Danielewski’s film No Exit (1962).
A waiting room well-suited for Hell or the waiting area to be accepted to Hell or elsewhere.
It’s getting dark outside and the gallery lights aren’t on yet. Through the windows evening rolls in over the brutally cold clear dawn. It’s there I see, perched in the main salon, on the floor, in the corner – Goodbye Dolly – an intimidatingly super-sized rag doll made of fabric and packing peanuts. Abby Lloyd’s giant doll measuring 98 x 148 x 160 inches, fits snuggly into the gallery’s warped, v-shaped space.
“Damn – this doll is nice and evil”, I say out-loud to an empty gallery with no appearance of Alyssa, yet.
“I know”, echoes Alyssa’s voice. Alyssa suddenly materializes out of the ether of the kitchen like a character from No Exit, dressed all in black.
“You want a drink?”, Alyssa asks.
“Yes … I feel … off and unnerved. I keep having these dreams about mannequins suddenly coming to life, so this show is spot-on.” I embarrassingly confess.
“It’s like, she’s gonna’ pick you up and carry you around.. it’s supposed to be the other way around”, I say laughing out-loud just to lighten the mood.
I always thought that some art manages to induce the quality of dreams.
The doll has mis-matching button eyes, and inverts the relationship between observed and observer. It’s dead-panned gaze stares into nothing and everywhere, in one gesture.
“Abby constructed her skin out of discounted batting and fabric from Joann Fabrics”, Alyssa says.
Alyssa’s iPhone rings and I see it’s Abby calling. Alyssa answers, and they begin discussing plans for a Goodbye Dolly slumber party. I overhear something about a Valentine’s Day party – “I hope I get invited”, I think to myself.
I tell Abby, “I like your big-ass-scary doll.. I have doll issues”
Abby laughs inaudibly on speakerphone and replies, “Me too obviously”.
We start discussing the outrageous scale Goodbye Dolly. “I wanted to fill the space. Can you tell I come from a family of hoarders?” Abby asks.
“I can.. this is ironically the most minimal show I’ve seen at the gallery, yet there’s a lot of presence”, I say, observantly.
“Yeah, it looks like it’s gonna explode with all your family’s stuff,” Alyssa chimes-in. The three of us laugh anxiously in unison in an attempt to save-face.
Our random banter turns to scant subjects of death, 90’s horror films involving murderous animatronic dolls, chats about that film featuring actor Karen Black in Trilogy of Terror (1972), master live-action animator directors like Jan Švankmajer and the creepy twin directors Brothers Quay. We go off about Raggedy Ann’s creator and the macabre “anti-vaxxing” back-story involving his daughter. We also share personal traumatic experiences involving haunted inhabited spaces, embarrassingly scary situations with dolls, object-relations, family-relations and private-histories. It’s refreshing to rekindle poetic twilight memories that seemed to have been forgotten stowaways of childhood, locked-up in the cabinets, basements and attics of a lifetime.
Abby Lloyd’s Goodbye Dolly is cathartic while hinting toward signatures of trauma both good and bad. Allowing gates of access to private moments, inward and outward gazes, uncertain anxious futures, and the full-frontal presence of the sublime. The show unearths and resurfaces notions of the poetics of space, the fantastic nature of objects, fetish, the spectrum between childhood-adulthood, and the all-too-overlooked magical dimensions of an artist’s relationship to imagination, itself and the great sensations of intimacies both insanely-big, impossibly-small and yet, close-to-heart.
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Abby Lloyd
Goodbye Dolly
ALYSSA DAVIS GALLERY
2 Cornelia St. #1102 New York, NY 10014
December 11th, 2021–April 3rd, 2022
Abby Lloyd, Goodbye Dolly, fabric, batting, Poly-fil, packing peanuts, rigid foam, plaster, vinyl, spray paint, 98″ x 148″ x 160″, 2021
Abby Lloyd is an artist and curator who lives and works in New York City. Recent group exhibitions include: Garden of Earthly Delights, curated by Anna Kustera, Spring Break Art Show, NYC, 2021 and Vision 20/20, White Columns, NYC, 2021. Recent solo exhibitions include Abby’s Room, Freddy, Harris, NY, 2019 and Why Meow at Catbox Contemporary, NYC, 2019. She recently self-published a cookbook Artists + Recipes that is available at Olympia, NYC. She currently has work in “Baitball 02”, Palazzo San Giuseppe, Bari, Italy and has an upcoming solo exhibition at Sunny NY, NYC. She is represented by Sunny NY, NYC.
