Doppelganger - Diane Worland

April 20th to May 13th, 2007.

Opening April 27th, 6 - 8pm.

 

 

    

   

   

 

Doppelganger – an apparition that represents who we’d want to be in a perfect world.

Mannequins are a mirror of how we would like to be, a glamorous alternative of who we are. In 1964 Adel Rootstein developed the first celebrity mannequin when she sculptured a 14 year old Twiggy. Since then the “ideal glamour woman” has been used as a template, from Lynda Carter to Victoria Beckham, depending on current social preferences.

They also mirror our social times. After World War II mannequins were made with happy smiles as they welcomed the troops back. In the months following 9/11 the mannequins in New York were very somber and draped in red white and blue. Six months later mannequins had lost their heads and the windows of New York were without glamour or personality. It took more than a year before frivolity returned. The mannequins of Hollywood Boulevard mirror a slightly tawdry, totally unreal sexuality.

Mannequins mirror the cityscape back at us on the windows they hide behind. City reflections take the mannequins out of the window and place them firmly in our world where they are very much alive. Like us. The city they inhabit is familiar but is seen eerily in reverse. The city reflections put the mannequin in a time and space, from the skyscrapers of New York, to the grand emporiums of Regent Street London and to the country shop fronts of rural Australia.

Doppelganger is the first of a series of exhibitions that cover a body of work taken over a thirty-year period. The images are from New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, London, Rome, Melbourne and Mount Gambier.

Diane Worland

Diane Worland has worked for the last thirty years as an art director and copy writer in the advertising industry, a lecturer in Creative Advertising and she’s a freelance illustrator. She has exhibited with Illustrators Australia at both the Victorian Arts Centre and Books Illustrated. She is an honorary life member of the Melbourne Advertising and Design Club and past-president of Illustrators Australia.

“In 1977 I was walking the streets of New York at midnight and became enthralled by the stillness and vitality of the mannequins looking over an empty 5th Avenue. They had been caught in the middle of action and were just waiting for me to leave to get back to what ever they were doing. Thus began a compulsion to trawl city streets at all times of night and day to capture mannequins and their reflections of the world.”