Perth Voice Interactive

WITH the Barbie movie just days from release, toys are in the forefront of the popular consciousness, but for researcher DeeDee Noon toys are always on the mind.

“Toys really are us,” Ms Noon tells us ahead of the opening of her latest exhibition. 

A photographer and PhD candidate at ECU, Noon says a toy is also a lens, a way of seeing relationships between people, objects, and stories.

The exhibition, Toying with Photography: F-Stop Troop takes the lens metaphor a step further, putting cameras and photography into centre frame.

Using 3D printing, Ms Noon has shrunk down well-known Perth male photographers into tiny figurines, “toyifying” them and placing them in playsets not typically expected for male photographers.

Ms Noon’s research and artwork often questions what is a toy, and prompts people to question the line where a toy blurs into a miniature, a model, a doll, a figurine, a sculpture, or a statue. 

Cameras follow that gradient, too, from nonfunctioning play cameras given to kids, to “toy cameras” like the plastic and popular Holga, to high end gear sometimes still referred to by enthusiasts as their new “toy”.

Ms Noon observes that technologies often take advantage of that familiar gradient and the greys around what is a toy, as marketers and designers slot their product into the most palatable stage.

“Driverless cars are made to look chunky and cute to diminish fears around them,” Ms Noon says, and marketing of vaping devices has been “widely criticised for using toy-like appeal”.

Like people, toys change with the times, and amid her renewed wave of popularity Barbie offers a prime example.

There’s now six decades of Barbiemorphs, spanning 60s norms through to modern diverse representations of Barbies with different body shapes, or with disabilities, or wearing hijabs, or the 2022 transgender Barbie. Now Barbie can look like any of us.

“We are all Barbie now,” Ms Noon says.

The exhibition is at Shopfront Gallery, 149 Beaufort Street Perth, running July 18 to August 5. It’s open Tuesdays to Saturdays with artist talks daily, check gallerycentral.com.au for a schedule.

by DAVID BELL