They stare at us expectantly, these dummies, as if awaiting a response. The inhabitants of the Vent Haven Museum regularly startle and impress visitors with their collective gaze. How to respond to such apparent yearning? Photographer Matthew Rolston succumbed to their silent pleas by making portraits of them. Each photograph is five feet by five feet in size, a larger-than-life square format of considerable significance. They are neither conventional vertical portraits nor horizontal still lifes but an intentional combination of both. Rolston sees these ventriloquists’ dummies as subjects, their individual personalities revealed by their hair and eye color, eyebrows, the shape of their noses and mouths, even the size of their ears.
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