Another one from the archives, originally written for Macabre Melbourne. A timely reprint, as Blindside are having a fundraiser next week.
What: The Miniature Museum and Sex, Death and Violence
Where: Blindside Artist Run Space, Nicholas Building, Room 14 Level 7, 37 Swanston St Melbourne
When: 11-27 June 2009, open 12-6pm Thursday to SaturdayExaggeration of size is somehow fascinating to the human race. We have the Big Banana, the Big Sheep, the Big Pineapple. Basically, you can add Big to anything and there’s likely to be a monument to it somewhere. When I’m not making, seeing or writing about art, I work in a Big Library. The State Library building itself is huge and impressive, as are some of the books in it. But my favourite thing in the library is not remotely large. I’m enamoured by the Midget Library, on display in the Mirror of the World exhibition. It seems we are just as fascinated by the tiny as we are by the enormous, it’s just not as blatantly obvious because, well, small things are harder to see.
As someone who works in a library and is obsessed by tiny objects, it’s no surprise that I was extremely interested to explore the latest show at Blindside Gallery, The Miniature Museum, from Queensland based artists, painter Nick Ashby and silversmith Elizabeth Shaw.
We create museums as small universes. Museums condense our knowledge of the world around us to a manageable level in order to help us understand how life works. As Michael Hawker so eloquently state in the catalogue for this exhibition, “Their museum moves us out of the present to an interior space that finds its inspiration in personal and collective history and the subconscious workings of memory.”
The Miniature Museum is installed in the second gallery space at Blindside, reached by walking through the exhibition in Gallery One called Sex, Death and Violence. These two exhibitions work wonderfully together, with the work in Gallery One by Melbourne artists Cherelyn Brearley, Pip Ryan and Natalie Ryan creating a wonderfully dark and morbid atmosphere. The standout piece for me was Natalie Ryan’s Interrupting Decay, which I think is—or was—a sheep skull suspended in a perspex cube. Gruesome beauty at its best.
The Miniature Museum is less confronting in its presentation but is just as haunting. A Wunderkammer of delight, this collection of tiny works manages to be simultaneously heartwarming and sombre. Themes of death, restoration, fragmentation, memory and humanity are explored through the small sculptures and tiny paintings encased in beautiful handmade frames. The use of found objects in the work of both artists is highly successful, both in execution and the relationship to ideas of remembrance and value. This is a small exhibition with a big impact.
