Bevan Ramsay’s Recent Sculpture Addresses the Sexualization of Girls’ Toys

By Ruth Melville

Is this a male fantasy about a bride? A female fantasy about a suitor? Ramsay leaves it to the viewer.

“Unbridled,” Bevan Ramsay’s show of recent sculpture at the Norfolk Library, might initially be startling to some viewers. The sculptures are made, not from traditional materials like stone or metal or wood, but out of globs of plaster painted bright colors, cheap bead necklaces, glitter, fake jewels and, above all, fashion dolls like the iconic Barbie.

Ramsay, who moved to Norfolk from Manhattan, started studying art when he was about seven years old, taking drawing and painting classes in his native Montreal. It wasn’t until he was in college that he began to think about three-dimensional work. After dropping out of school to train and work as a furniture maker and restorer, he returned to get a B.A. in philosophy and intellectual history from McGill—which helps explain his unusually thoughtful approach to his art—and then an M.F.A. in sculpture.

The inspiration for the current show came after Ramsay and his wife, Eliza Little, had their daughter, Charlotte. One day, when Charlotte was about eight months old, it struck him how “almost lewd, how sexual” one of her toys was. His reaction was intense, and he started wondering, “Who designed this? What were they thinking?” As he thought more about the material cultural world that little girls inhabit, he found the amount of gendering and sexuality that could be packed into a toy “really staggering.”

These ideas percolated in the back of his mind for about two years, but it wasn’t until he was invited by the Norfolk Library to present a show that he started making art out of them. Not knowing exactly what he was going to do, Ramsay started gathering materials—toys, dolls and super-“girly” craft materials like glitter, beads and paste-on plastic jewels.

Contrary to his previous practice—for example, his starkly beautiful formal busts of homeless people he met on the streets of New York, for which he spent years studying portraiture—he just started working “without a fully formed statement in mind.” As he began putting his materials together, he let accident happen. “Things just seemed right,” Ramsay says, “without my necessarily knowing why. Something was striking a chord, and I was content to let that be.”

Perhaps as a result of this more free-form way of working, elements recur and morph through the different pieces. Fashion dolls, long flowing hair, wedding dresses and ponies appear repeatedly. Formless blobs of polyurethane, thanks to a touch of paint or a scattering of plastic jewels, resemble clouds or collapsed wedding cakes or even intestines. Tufts and swirls of pink piped polyurethane icing look both luscious and sickly sweet.

The sculptures are eerie and strange, but they are also quite funny. In the title piece “Unbridled,” a doll wearing a shiny sheath dress, pink high heels and a purple saddle tilts her head at the viewer as she kneels on . . . hard to say what exactly: a mound of bejeweled yellow plaster that looks like a collapsed wedding cake but has a neck decorated with a string of pink beads. The large pink unicorn in “Unicorn Milk” has a mane and tail so long they trail and puddle on the ground and two rows of teats—My Little Pony on estrogen. It’s a fantastic world where bits and pieces of ordinary girls’ games mutate and combine into surreal images.

The titles of the pieces are often plays on words (bridle/bridal) or wry comments on what the viewer sees. The sculptures “Goldilocks” I, II and III all have locks of dark brown hair poking through a gold-painted surface. “I Only Eat Pink Things” is an intestine-like swirl of plaster painted bright pink with round lavender globs. In “Glorious Steinem,” a black doll in a pink jumpsuit sits perched on cloudlike forms dotted with fake jewels, all against a glittery background. “Simone Aurevoir” (Simone de Beauvoir/au revoir) shows a doll with her back turned to the viewer.

Perhaps inevitably, Ramsay has now started pondering boys’ toys, where violence, not sex, plays the dominant cultural role. Thinking ahead to a show scheduled for 2017 in Brooklyn, he says, “It might be interesting to show the pieces [about girls’ and boys’ toys] mixed in together.” With issues of gender identity, sexuality and transgender rights currently at the forefront of public discussion, it is, as he says, “an interesting time to be thinking about these ideas.”

Bevan Ramsay’s show will be on display at the library until August 3.

Photo of Bevan Ramsay and his sculpture “Unicorn’s Milk” by Christopher Little.