Texts

Down the Rabbit Hole is a reproduction of twelve illustrations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) made by John Tenniel (1866). Assembled by the artist, Alice’s face is masked in all illustration. Alice Liddell – the brunette real Alice – appears somewhere in the frame. In Tenniel’s illustrations, Alice is transformed into a blonde girl. In literary, feminist and post-structuralist theory, Alice has been taken as an intriguing example of subject, her identity is a not that of a minority or being deterritorialized, but rather, it is in and of itself a continual process of deterritorialization. Following the artist ‘down the rabbit hole’, we stop reading, and start seeing Alice: between the real, Caroll’s rumored fantasy-child-inamorata, and the representation and transformation she undergoes in Tenniel’s depictions. Down the Rabbit Hole restores the fiction back into our reality – through a binding reference, a lock of dark hair.

Sarah Rifky

April 2009