ILLUSTRATION & GRAPHIC DESIGN BLOG: Karen Justl

BIO: Karen Justl is an illustrator and graphic designer. She holds an MDes (Masters of Design) from the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto, Ontario. She is a native of Winnipeg, Manitoba where she received her BFA Honors in Painting at The University of Manitoba. She is also an interdisciplinary visual artist researching caricature, facial expression, body language, illustration techniques and Freud's theories of slapstick humour & the uncanny. Her illustrations have been published across Canada in Applied Arts, subTerrain Magazine, Chesterfield, Kiss Machine, Herizons MB, Pilot Project and Crow's Toes. She teaches in the Digital Lab at the Toronto School of Art and in Continuing Studies at OCAD University.

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Karen Justl and The Ontario College of Art and Design
present
The Dolls in The Playground

a Masters Thesis Exhibition at Launch Projects Gallery, 404 Adelaide St West
June 10 – 13, 2010,
Opening Reception: June 11th, 7pm to 10pm


Rainer Maria Rilke laments that the one's fusion with the doll is a barren union that promises everything and delivers nothing,“dragged as companions into cots, abducted into the deep furrows of illnesses, appearing in dreams, entangled in the disasters of feverish nights -such is the nature of dolls”.


In my thesis exhibition of The Dolls in The Playground, the psychology of disruptive emotions, contemporary Gothic and, a Freudian uncanny is used to frustrate the man-made figure. Its proponents are a band of outsiders celebrating depression and antagonism. It is a grotesquery that greets one with a disembodied hand, a pail of hot oil suspended over the entranceway, the sound of laughing from behind the wall or under the floorboards, or an unmoving small menacing figure in a labcoat with a hatchet or scalpel.
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