There is something extremely fascinating in dioramas and worlds in miniature: some of us may feel like God in front of them, but most of us probably think about being a child again and being able to play with your own toy world.
A new exhibition opening this week at the Ronchini Gallery in London curated by Bartholomew F. Bland, Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Hudson River Museum, offers visitors the chance to explore tiny artificial landscapes and alternative realities recreated by three New York-based artists.
"Dream No Small Dreams: The Miniature Worlds of Adrien Broom, Thomas Doyle & Patrick Jacobs" tackles through different artworks the current fascination of contemporary artists worldwide with small-scale hand-built environments, chunks of a world that has been captured and suspended in its own time presented as dioramas, models, sculptures, and photographs, created to bring one closer to nature and to the illusionary tales told by the artists.
Adrien Broom has lived and worked in London, New York, Florence, and Boston, and mainly focuses her work on digital images representing fantastic and imagined landscapes that she recreates in miniature.
In Broom’s "Centered" a tiny woman stands on a window sill admiring the landscape in front of her, maybe dreaming about the future, maybe contemplating suicide; in "Left Over Things", a group of figurines - a man and a woman and two bell boys - look as if they were sitting in front of a fire, but they are actually perched on top of a candle; "Direction" portrays instead the rather funny escape of a tiny figurine digging her way under a placid green park.
Broom's images have a narrative quality about them since the artist prompts the viewer to rebuild a story involving the miniature characters portrayed.
Thomas Doyle has created in the last few years pieces that have been shown internationally managing to capture the attention of gallery and museum visitors from different countries.
Though the main protagonists of his pieces is usually the typical American house at times precariously perched on a cliff, swallowed by the ground or placidly sitting on the edge of what looks like a huge crater, Doyle's dioramas seem to have a universally appealing meaning, often based on the "presence Vs absence" dichotomy (at times the house is still standing, at others it is partially destroyed).
While Doyle's pieces represent scenes of apocalyptic destruction and disaster and they are often populated by disturbing characters - figurines representing cold looking grown-ups aimlessly walking among the debris dragging behind them a young child - behind the chaos and confusion there is also humour and irony.
Via his houses Doyle hints indeed at modern anxieties such as the fear of losing everything you have built in your life, while the houses seem to be bravely laughing on the edge of their own graves.
Patrick Jacobs studied at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria, and at the University of West Florida before receiving his MFA Fine Art from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Jacobs recreates perfect yet artificial and isolated miniature lawns or interiors of apartments viewable only through peepholes and glass portholes in the walls.
Inviting his audiences to peep through the portholes to admire his natural environments, Jacobs asks them to spot the smallest details hiding in his constructions and coming up with their own reality and their own version of his scenes.
In his sets recreated using a wide range of materials including paper, plastic, and metal, and paying attention to the smallest details, green areas prevail as if the artist was hinting at nature as a way to escape the artificial world we have locked ourselves in.
Dioramas are usually more relevant for purely aesthetic reasons than for the amount of significance of the information they give us, but in Broom, Doyle and Jacobs' case, it is actually the message that these pieces and images are charged with that is important.
The works by these three artists may be quite small when it comes to the size, but most times the smallest scenes are the most effective, as the story they tell is compressed, offering a minimum of distractions to the viewers who are then able to get to the core of the tiny epiphanies they're watching, leaving behind the chaos and confusion of the real world.
Dream No Small Dreams, curated by Bartholomew F. Bland, will be at Ronchini Gallery London, 22 Dering Street, London W1S 1AN, from 6 September to 5 October 2013.
Image credits
All images in this post courtesy the artist and Ronchini Gallery
Thomas Doyle, Proxy (Haven Ln.), Mixed media, 21 x 40 x 27 in, 2012
Thomas Doyle, Armistice, Mixed media , 25 x 21 x 18 in, 2011
Adrien Broom, Centered, 2011, digital C-type print, 40 x 60 in
Adrien Broom, Direction, 2012, digital C-type print, 45 x 45 in
Adrien Broom, Left Over Things, 2010, digital C-type print, 60 x 40 in
Adrien Broom, Untitled, 2011, digital C-type print, framed, 40 x 60 in
Thomas Doyle, Mire, 2013, mixed media, 80 x 24 x 24 in
Thomas Doyle, Coming from where we're going, Mixed media, 24 x 14 in diameter, 2010
Thomas Doyle, Coming from where we're going (detail), Mixed media, 24 x 14 in diameter, 2010
Thomas Doyle, Proxy (1340 Chippewa Dr.), Mixed media, 16 x 14 in diameter, 2011
Patrick Jacobs, Double Stump with Oak Polypore and Dead Leaves, 2013
Patrick Jacobs, Double Stump with Red Banded Brackets, 2013
Patrick Jacobs, Stump with Curly Dock and Wild Carrot Weed, 2013
Patrick Jacobs, Stump with Red Banded Brackets #2, Mixed Media, 29 x 37 x 24cm, 2012
Thomas Doyle, Beset, 2013, mixed media, 17.5 x 14.5 x 14.5 in
Thomas Doyle, Beset (detail), 2013, mixed media, 17.5 x 14.5 x 14.5 in
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