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Art Art & Books

Female forms fascinate

Hoda Zarbaf at Walnut Contemporary (201 Niagara), to April 30. 416-271-6599. Rating: NNNN


Recycled clothing, textiles, dolls and furniture become exuberant, colourful evocations of the female body in the hands of Iranian-born, Toronto-based artist Hoda Zarbaf. 

The sewn sculptures in Soft Souls range from almost life-sized to toy-like. Inspired by sexuality, childbirth and breastfeeding, some are amusingly raunchy, others more painful and creepy. Amorphous forms made of bulbous stuffed patchwork that spill out of bodies onto pedestals or chairs represent discharges of bodily fluids or ecstatic sexual energy. 

In central work Vaginal Rapture, a large arc of bright patchwork and embroidery emerges from a bulging vagina upholstered into a chair seat. In Tangible Release, the magenta velvet from which Zarbaf has sewn a headless female figure has overtaken the chair she is seated on, giving the sense of melting.

Cartoon references in the doll-based works may relate to Zarbaf’s previous work in animation. The Mistress, Her Baby And The Ejaculating Unicorn features a female figure with mouse ears riding a unicorn. And in An Awkward Birth, a balloon-like spew of colour comes out of the mouth of a reclining Minnie-type doll. Zarbaf sometimes gives the cloth dolls their own smaller plastic dolls, as Mark Hogancamp did in the film Marwencol.

She embroiders words in Farsi on some works: the unicorn rider’s face is the word for affection lines from suggestive conversation with a Madam Heshmat cover the back of a woman in panties and stockings kneeling on a hassock in Down-Time in Revolving Birth, a doll arching her back in an agonized position is attached by an umbilical cord to a cushion with an ironic message that translates as “My mother says women in our family have super-easy births.”

Headless or limbless figures or those with arms that morph into phalluses could be disturbing in other contexts, but Zarbaf makes them into empowering expressions of the emotional experience of the female sexual body. 

art@nowtoronto.com

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