Aug
3
Small Worlds – Part 4 – Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz
Filed Under Art, Miniatures | Comments Off
Martin and Munoz - Travelers
Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz are a pair of artists who express themselves through the medium of miniatures in snowglobes. Like Thomas Doyle much of their work is dark and surreal. Their work has been described as depicting the elaborate bleakness of an emotional icy desert, and indeed, most of the pairs globes feature snow and ice. Many of the scenes evoke a strong sense of foreboding or depict the aftermath of some tragedy with the unwitting participants stranded in an unforgiving wasteland.
Jul
17
Small Worlds – Part 3 – Thomas Doyle Snowglobes
Filed Under Art, Miniatures | Comments Off
Clearing by Thomas Doyle
Thomas Doyle creates snowglobes with fantastically dark and subversive themes. Take for example “Clearing” from his “Reclamations” series. In this wonderfully recursive and self-referential work, a person (ironically trapped in a snowglobe) encounters another person trapped within a smaller snowglobe and crying out for help. It is this interplay of the real and surreal that makes Doyle’s work so compelling. The miniature person in the outer snowglobe is clearly amazed and confounded at having discovered a person trapped in a snowglobe, though he himself is blissfully unaware of his own predicament.
Nov
12
Small Worlds – Part 2 – Michael Samuels
Filed Under Miniatures | Leave a Comment
Burn Every Clue
I had real trouble selecting my favourite image of Michael Samuels’ art for this post, since I like it all so much. Michael’s work consists of small scenes, reminiscent of those on a model railroad, but with some twists. The first thing you notice is that the scenes are out of context – no attempt has been made to conceal the fact that these are models. The tables and shelves that the works are displayed on haven’t been finished neatly and the models haven’t been blended into the display units. This lack of boundaries and the atmospheirc lighting makes you feel like you’re actually in the scene. I can imagine myself in the image above, walking home late at night, along a deserted street with just a pool of light illuminating the overflowing skip. I can almost feel the fog just beyond the puddle of light.
Image Credit: © Michael Samuels
Nov
10
Small Worlds – Part 1 – Little People
Filed Under Art, Miniatures | Leave a Comment
Since I’m fascinated by miniatures as art, I thought I’d do a small series of the artists and web-sites that I’m drawn to and try to explain (mostly for my own benefit) what it is I like about the work. Here’s part 1.
Nuart Show - Little People
Little People – a tiny street art project- The artist started this project by posing miniature people in various public places around London, photographing them and then leaving them to fend for themselves. The images suggest a tiny parallel world that exists alongside our own and occasionally intersects with tragic or amusing consequences. In this world where the gigantic meets the tiny, a real world bee becomes a monster to be killed with a rifle, and a snail serves as public transport. Even though each image creates an atmosphere and stands alone in its own right, it’s easy to string these images together in your mind and imagine the entirely alternative miniature world exisiting alongside our own.
My personal favourites are the pictures from the Nuart Show, where an entire scene has been modelled in a gallery. I particularly like the scene of the accident where a framed (real-world-sized) picture has come crashing down into the world of the little people and one unfortunate victim has been impaled by a gigantic shard of glass.
Image Credit: © slickachu