Diorama of a diorama of pigs - 3D sketch

And then, following all this exploration of miniatures, and after reading Teddy Bear Patriarchy (Donna Harraway) I decided to attempt a small diorama sketch of my own. Here is what I ended up with.

Artist: Lori Nix and dioramas of diorama-making

In line with these miniature things, someone in my animal class posted a link to this artist on facebook.

Lori Nix website

This is totally within that realm of really strange, eerie places that seem to be vaguely narrative and magical and mysterious. I love them! Especially the fact that she did this whole series called Unnatural History or something with dioramas of behind-the-scenes natural history museums.

This is really funny. :)

This reminds me of that lovely song by Regina Spektor about a lake and the genius. 

There are deer next to this one!

Charles LeDray

Perhaps the very very best thing about the trip to NYC was seeing Charles LeDray's completely magical show at the Whitney, which I have been able to find at least some images of via the wonders of intornets, becuase the book associated with the show (workworkworkwork) is like 45 dollars and the photos are of an installation in maybe London or something anyway. Point is, that the work was amazing. There were basically three components -- these minature clothing pieces, tiny things carved out of bone, and miniscule wheel-thrown pottery. Also, he used to make his own stuffed animals, so there were some weird ones of those too. This is definitely one of those things that I am thrilled to have seen, because it is not nearly as striking in the photos as it was in real life. Breathtaking really. Anyway, here they are:

Imagine this maybe the size of an American girl doll. . . tiny leather gloves

This thrift-store basement tableau thing was the most phenomenal, magical finale of the whole show. It was in a huge room that was completely black, so that the only light came from the little drop ceilings (complete with dust in the lights)

This is a really small mattress . . . like maybe the size of a large sheet of paper? that is sewn perfectly and drapped with all the jackets from a party.

Small spaces: A few things that are diorama-like

I came across a couple of works that play with scale in a way that is totally unexpected and wonderful.

First, an artist by the name of Dan Lavitt, who does these really odd miniature room things that have some things at a smaller scale and some things at life size scale . . . and then puts people in the spaces . . .

And then this photo from the LaChapelle studio . . . 

Small World: I WILL learn to spell the word "diorama" . . .

Small World: Dioramas in Contemporary Art. Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Essays by Toby Kamps, Ralph Rugoff. 2000. (Dates of the show were Jan 23 - April 30 2000)

The essays were short, but still interesting and I gleaned a few bits out of them.

[ think of travels in hyperreality! ]

In the Toby Kamps essay, I was reminded that dollhouses, model railroads, and museum displays all fit within this idea of "diorama" and that they can be miniature or life-size and that they are capable of "didacticism" and "free-wheeling fantasy" which I like. "Simulated environments"

7
"They engage our sense of depth perception and, with it, a bodily awareness of space, which encourages us to make the imaginative leap into their construct. The static nature of most dioramas also contributes to their uncanny effect. Human vision is keyed to motion , and seeing environments and beings entirely devoid of movement is disconcerting and fascinating--like stop-action photography in three dimensions. Another thrill of dioramas is that they are intrinsically morbid. To arrest life, they must necessarily kill it (literally when taxidermy is involved.)"

Apparently, museum displays of "habitat groups" were developed in Sweden and the U.S. I wonder what the Swedish ones looked like and why those two places?

Donna Haraway wrote an essay called "Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936"

"In an age where many artists are fluent in several different media, the process of creating discrete universes allows them to bring all their skills to bear. Dioramas allow their makers to be painters, sculptors, landscapers, and architects, as well as scientists and curators. In them, artists can practice painstaking craftsmanship and realism in a time often satisfied with schematic or provisional ideas. " 10

!!!! YES!

---

In the Ralph Rugoff

He brings up some historical examples that I hadn't seen or thought of before, including Ed and Nancy Kienolz (this room that I really like "Sollie 17") . . . I like the room because of its' window and ceiling and completeness and I kind of want to make a room. :)

People whose work I liked in the show:

Michael Ashkin - "tiny no-man's lands" on table tops . . . empty swimming pools, deserts, etc.

Matt Collishaw did a miniature English town with a pub and stuff and then projected little videos of a bar fight on them. Kind of neat.

Tony Matelli - did life-size displays like one where three boyscouts are throwing up called "lost and sick" and one where two pre-hominid creatures try to re-attach their tails (that they are loosing through evolution.) I really like this idea because it takes an aspect of science and amplifies it to a really humorous level.

"Tony Matelli specializes in strange "David Lynchean" storytelling, as in his installation Lost & Sick, 1996." (from http://www.artnews.com/issues/article.asp?art_id=1150)
Here is a link to his gallery, Leo Koenig.

Clara Williams built a desktop landscape on a miniature train scale that covers and entire desk in an office cubicle.

Artist: Jean Lowe

Another artist featured in the "Next of Kin" show that I thought was particularly noteworthy was Jean Lowe, who created a room installation that was a "send-up" of French Rococo or Neoclassical Salons . . . she makes papier mache furniture, books, props, etc. and hand paints them, but in this very obviously hand-made sort of way, so that was looks like a big set piece sort of breaks down. For her installation in the show, she did one called "Gentlemen's Club" that discussed the use of apes in the medical research and entertainment industry by creating this club room with hand-painted books in it. Around the room, she created a "four paneled narrative" through the use of a faux wallpaper mural depicting "habitat destruction, transplantation, institutional settings, and species survival strategies" (30). The author, Ron Platt, says her use of this loose hand-made style is a strategy for being too over-the-top or direct with her message, saying"The humor and hand-made touch charm us into considering her environmentally proactive message which might otherwise be dismissed as too heavy-handed or didactic."

The particular piece in the show wasn't online, and the image in the catalog wasn't very interesting either, so I'll just stick a couple of other examples here.

Here's a blog with a few more images of her paintings of these proposed(?) (or maybe realized) because I may have seen a photo of the real thing . . . spaces of European elegance that she puts big-box store items into.

On Sandy Skoglund - some notes from some books

Back to Sandy Skoglund, this time with more information.

In an interview with Robert Rosenblum

Notes about her life: She went to University of Iowa and was interested in "Hollywood narrative structure"

She talks about how it has to do with prejudices in the culture - against snakes and scaly, hard surfaces "reptilian" "as well as Jungian or Freudian yearnings for things soft and cuddly." Her "Walking on Eggshells" has snakes and bunnies in it. AHHHH.

But then there is this shift "for example, the purpose [with Radioactive Cats] there was to undermine the stereotype in our culture of the cute, domesticated pet. The cats are meant to dominate the scene as survivors in a postnuclear situation because they've adapted by turning green."

This is really interesting to me for a few reasons, One is a little dumb, I'm fascinated by this convention that bright lime green is automatically this science-fictiony, radioactive, creepy.

This idea of things taking over, crawling, something inocuous becoming a real problem, is something I love, and she has one called "Atomic Love" where RAISINS are covering everything. And that is so great. Because a raisin is so cute and small and actually kind of funny to me, and then there are thousands of them and they totally make me want to scream and run away. The interviewer in this book describes it as "the kind of horrific conversion of infinitely small things suddenly blotting out humanity . . . it's such a fascinating mix of supermarket abundance and the extinction of us poor individuals . . . " (emphasis mine). This is so fascinating to me that abundance, which I have previously talked about as being safe and secure in it's plentitude, actually becomes horrific at a certain point. I love when it becomes threatening.

She said something about drawing a line between an art installation and a fun house. I LOVE THE FUN HOUSE. So creepy. :) I kind of secretly wish I could create things like that, a room full of the balloons, mirrors, floating up to the sky. Loosing your balloon, or being overwhelmed by other balloons. This also has the do with a stalker thing - "YOU ARE SO SPECIAL." So much so that i bought you 900 balloons. CREEP.

She did one called "Sock Situation." I think this is FANTASTIC. She talks about how the objects in the photos break up the space, almost crawl across the surface, which I can totally see in this one. The best part is the guy trying to vacuum one up. :) She did this for a display window in Barney's Dept. Store, by the way.

Her choice of color, she says, was about rejecting the black and white photography of the 70's and "just wanting to be bad, in poor taste, and make something that was aggressive on the wall."

They talk about how her work has to do with horror, science fiction, and Suburbia (!)
"Science fiction presented a landscape that reflected the depth of my experience of suburban life in America because it's a landscape of openness, of empty space, and a lot of anxiety going on in that open space."

"To me, terror is more terrifying if it relates closely to ordinary life. If it's more plausible, its more terrifying."

-------
Carol Squiers:
"Throughout her work Skoglund sets up a series of disquieting oppositions, among them visuality versus content, celebration versus critique, whimsy versus horror, the banal versus the extraordinary, the dream versus the nightmare." I LOVE THIS.

This author also talks a lot about what the photograph means as it is displayed next to the installation. Which makes me think about what a painting might do next to a thing, or how one might not have to abandon painting things in order to utilize other media. Because the relationship between the two (even trying to figure out what is different -- in her case the presence or absence of actual humans is pretty huge-- is really interesting.) The photograph is the lens through which she composes the whole installation, though, which is really cool. She makes sure none of the animals overlap or obscure eachother from the camera's viewpoint.

She did an early performance piece where she kicked "colored candies" (jellybeans and gumdrops) around the floor and swept them up in a "parody of abstract expressionism" which the author calls her first experiment in what she calls "the inappropriate use of food." I like that phrase too. Candy is an untapped area here. To me anyway, because the kid fantasy, and even an adult fantasy, is to have just TONS of candy, so much more than you could ever eat -- the whole thing with saving Easter bunnies a whole year just so there is another one to replace it. So . . .

She said she was "trying to make something that my relatives could understand."

They mention how "orderly repetetivness" can give a "nightmarish quality." Like marching bands? :) [ much of my previous work is about marching bands ]

On why she sculpts the animals herself: "I didn't want to critique 'catness' as seen by our culture, which is what would happen if I went out and got a found-object cat to photograph; using found objects is inevitably very toungue-in-cheek, coy, kitsch. So I decided to make a cat." I like this too.

They talk a lot about her flattening visual space with the colors or the pattern.

Revenge of the Goldfish is so great because they are floating. How aresome is this??

And now, here are just a deluge of images of her and her work:

Also, I am constantly amazed that people don't bring her up more often, either to me because I'm really into repetition, animals, weirdness, etc, but in general. People don't see to know who she is, yet I find all of this to be fantastic and great and overflowing with content.