Christian Pitt's art fits somewhere between the seventh-grade world of Dawn Wiener in the 1996 film Welcome to the Dollhouse and the parlor life of Nora Helmer in Henrik Ibsen's 1879 play A Doll's House. The dollhouse family and creature-cute monsters of Pitt's photos and miniature dioramas are the stuff an adolescent like Dawn Wiener might be trying to wean herself from. They are narcotic play-pretties for an awkward girl edging her way into the realm of womanhood. Coupling nuclear family figurines and handcrafted dollies in sunshine and blue sky settings, Pitt sets alight proscenia that turn Ibsen's world upside-down. It's not so much that the issues of patriarchy, overwrought materialism and mendacity with which Ibsen grappled are not problems in the 21st century. It's just that Pitt's world is undaunted by them. Hers is a place where tiny monsters meet mini mavens, yellow flowers bloom, and the imagination cures all.

The Oklahoma artist wants to encourage people 'to act in the way they truly wish to.' Her art is meant to thrust people into what she calls 'the imagined life.' The three-inch-tall, pop-eyed and wart-specked creatures --Nevus Brown, Bloody ol' Mole and Cyphus -- appear in fuzzy felt shapes and flat photographs, driven less by the moral messages of the 1960s stop-action animated series Davey and Goliath and more by the sheer good cheer of Sesame Street. While Pitt's hand-sewn dolls bring to mind Mexican doll-making craft, they do not pack the political punch of the small Bush-Diablo dolls or the machine gun-toting Zapatistas made by modern Mayan women in Chiapas. Instead, they are perverse, fun and lighthearted, like the work of the Canadian artists' collective Royal Art Lodge.

Also a member of an artists' collective, the Norman, Oklahoma-based Monstercoop, Pitt works primarily in two media: the hands-on craft of sewing and the hands-deft click and bump up of the camera. The simultaneous play of such disparate technologies is cause for edginess and intellectual provocation.

Pitt's show, Monsters in the Living Room, marks another triumph in the Project Room at Conduit Gallery. Danette Dufilho, the Project Room curator, has a knack for installing work in a room that is challenging to fit things in: it is somewhere between the size of a kitchen pantry and your average DFW closet. Lining the walls are Pitt's small photographs of characters, a dollhouse mother and a number of her handmade monsters. He Whisked Her Away [Shit on Her Shoes] is a photograph of a bulbous-eyed Gumby in black felt, sweeping a miniature blond housewife off her feet. Some Encouragement shows the same odd couple arm in arm. Circling the wall of the room are variations on this theme -- photos of mini monsters and mini people -- interspersed with a few actual figures seated on couches or dangling from cocktail shakers. Pitt also dabbles in portraiture. A set of five class pictures, Cakepants, Ronny Alien, Baby Z, Pinky Z and Zap Atista, shows five smiling monsters, each shot individually seated in a large wooden chair à la Lily Tomlin as Edith Ann. In Whoa, the Car, Pitt Photo-shopped one of her creatures into an image of two Japanese men gawking before a car.

The logic of the photographs is twofold. As photographs of the unreal, they offer a double play on the theme of the original versus the copy. That is to say, since a photograph is already a reproduction of the real, Pitt's photos of what-if creatures make for a playful redundancy. They are fakes of fakes. They set in relief the arbitrary nature of 'reality.' They function also in terms of representation. The substance of the photographs, what they depict, seems to be telling us to lighten up. Yes, happiness is everything. But meeting societal norms -- marrying, falling in love and being part of a nuclear family -- is not the vehicle to blissdom. In fact, imaginings of a different world, an existence beyond normalcy, are guaranteed to bring greater satisfaction.

Pitt's dollies are part of the current renaissance of fabric and textile art. In the art world, sewing is the rage. Yet, at the same time, it is not trendy. It is not a flash in the pan and it is not shallow. Pitt's work is proof of the profound nature of much of the new textile art. Four Pink Eyes, a quartet of black monsters sidling along an aluminum cocktail shaker, pave the way for rethinking otherness once again. Pitt's little guys quash creeping xenophobia with their own little genesis myth: a broken narrative of a human-like species that is inherently open to difference.

Images courtesy Conduit Gallery

Charissa N. Terranova is an Associate Proffessor at SMU and a Contributing Editor to Glasstire.