When I found these (um, AWESOME) Rainbow Brite magnets in the $1.00 aisle at Target (my favorite aisle, incidentally, not only at Target but at all stores, really), I was not only thrilled back to my four-year-old self, I also realized something about the toys I loved most when I was a kid. I wasn’t particularly interested in your typical white-clothed, realistic baby doll, nor was I especially interested in Barbies. What fascinated me most were toys like Rainbow Brite, and even the indescribably hideous and thankfully short-lived Huggabunch kids. Why? Because there was a doll, yes, but then there were OTHER dolls — in the case of the Huggabunch kids, a smaller baby Huggabunch kids, and, in the case of Rainbow Brite, the Sprites. Rainbow Brite was probably my favorite, simply because she not only had one companion doll — her Sprite, Twink — but three — Starlite, her horse; Puppy Brite, her dog; and, predictably but wonderfully, Kitty Brite, her cat. In fact, I’m relatively sure that my still-surviving obsession with Taco Bell began because they offered free Sprites and Huggabunch babies with a kid’s meal.
This provided a window not only into my childhood psyche but also into the fact that it survives to this day. I’m obsessed with miniatures, with smaller representations of larger ideas and forms, and with things-within-things. I’ve finally started a project which takes these obsessions to their extreme, balancing three narratives which fit inside each other — or, hopefully, will — like nesting dolls, or, rather, like a Huggabunch baby in the arms of a Huggabunch kid, or Twink in the Rainbow-shaped Rainbow Brite house I had as a child.
I’d like to pretend that this is due to an interest in literary theory and postmodernism, but I have to be honest. It’s all about Rainbow and Twink.
