Oversized Plastic Toy Indians by Yoram Wolberger

The sculpture of San Francisco based visual artist Yoram Wolberger may be bright and colorful but the meaning in each piece is profound and sincere.  He takes the beloved toys of our childhood and subverts their innocence all in the name of making a point.  Here is the artist profile from his website:

"Yoram Wolberger uses childhood toys and everyday domestic items to create his large scale sculptures, foregrounding the latent symbolism and cultural paradigms of these objects that so subtly inform Western culture. By enlarging this ephemera to life size, Wolberger emphasizes the distortions of their original manufacture disallowing any real illusion and conceptually forcing the viewer to reconsider their meanings. When enlarged beyond any possibility of dismissal, we see that toy soldiers create lines between Us and Them, plastic cowboys and Indians marginalize and stereotype the Other, even wedding cake bride and groom figurines dictate our expected gender roles."

And here is what he makes:

Red Indian Chief, 2005

No Reservations: Native American History and Culture in Contemporary Art

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

(Source: flickr)

 Red Indian #2 (Bowman), 2005

No Reservations: Native American History and Culture in Contemporary Art

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

(Source: flickr)

Red Indian #4 (Spearman)

Brooklyn Museum

(Source: brooklynmuseum.org)

And you can never leave the alpha without its omega:

Blue Cowboy #3 (Double Gunslinger)

(Source: tumblr)

These works are a perfect case study in the obsession with everything Native.  The Israeli born artist Yoram Wolberger has taken two of the most potent symbols of Americana, Cowboys and Indians, and revealed them for what they are- rough-edged, bloated, one-dimensional caricatures.

His art is similar to that of Kent Monkman recently profiled on the Beyond Buckskin blog.  They both take symbols of the past- plastic toy Indians and classic western landscape painting- and completely turn them on their heads.  Monkman inserts the sick and silly in his attempt to "queer the frontier" and subvert traditional white dominance.  Wolberger brings the miniature distortions of tiny toy Indians into full scale, making their stereotypical imagery easier to grasp.

Wolberger is someone like myself, a person obsessed with the obsession.  He understands the power and impact these toys had on untold millions of American children. As he puts it so succinctly, "plastic cowboys and Indians marginalize and stereotype the Other."

The question remains: Will people get the message in his work?

Take a look at this photo:

Here is how I would caption it: "Check it out dudes, I'm a cowboy!"

(Source: supertouchart.com)

The reason I posted this photo is because I couldn't find one of a gallery visitor next to "Red Indian Chief" with their "how" hand up or their hand covering their mouth (which is very a good thing).

I've been accused before of being too hard on people, claiming that they would never "get" the subtleties in pieces like this or works of satire.  These sculptures once again fall under that broad category of "using stereotypes to debunk/satirize stereotypes," though considering the power of the artist's own statements, he assuredly knows what he's doing.

That being said, the pessimist in me feels that there will still be people who will see these sculptures and have their stereotypes reinforced.  But thankfully the artist's own words give me confidence that anyone who visits these sculptures in a gallery will never look at "Indians" the same way again.

In case you're wondering, Wolberger has not limited himself to just Cowboys and Indians.  Below is another beloved childhood toy re-sized so that the gallery visitors will never see it the same way again:

Title unknown

(Source: artbusiness.com)

Happy Memorial Day!