Impossible Microcosms
Nov 4 - Dec 1, 2024
California College of the Arts PLAySPACE Gallery
145 Hooper Street, San Francisco, CA
We construct tiny, tweakable, contained worlds. Impossible Microcosms takes as its inspiration the possibility that these miniature places we build exist beyond the reach of an audience, and even a maker.
The pieces in Impossible Microcosms dramatize inaccessibility and play with a theoretical and material alienation of the viewer. Some pieces literally use boxes, walls, and other formal representations of nestling; others belong to elaborate fictional stories. Regardless, the works fulfill themselves. The implicit wills of their conceptions insulate them from our waking, walking world, a fact materially indicated by their scale. Locating the altogether-small in the gallery hardens the barriers between artifact and animal, exposing inherent yearnings in the works.
“…[E]xperiments in relative scale illustrate the dissonance that lies at the heart of miniaturisation, for within their intrinsic appeal is an understanding that they are not quite of our own reality[.]” This excerpt from “Worlds in Miniature” alludes to the unsettling implication that little things belong in little worlds beyond us.* Steward further exposes the emotional meaning of hyperbolic materiality in ON LONGING, where the micro and macro material cosmos objectify our desire. In this exaggeration, we project and process our “constant daydreams,” our obsessions, and, as in Impossible Microcosms, our nightmares.**
*Davy and Dixon, “What Makes a Miniature?”, WORLDS IN MINIATURE, p1
**Steward, Susan, ON LONGING: NARRATIVES OF THE MINIATURES, THE GIGANTIC, THE SOUVENIR, THE COLLECTION, p54
