Miniatures
In natural history museums, science centers or in any other form of collection, I’m invariably drawn to miniature reproductions. These painstakingly labored depictions of heroic engineering achievements, collective historical moments and revered natural and cultural sites present themselves silently in stasis, arrested in a curatorial amber.
There is something about the paralyzed moment, the uncanny absence of a temporal progression and the stylistic homogenization of the crafted components that sets my teeth on edge.
Seductive, melancholic, fantastic miniatures that as Susan Stewart writes in On Longing are “a diminutive, and thereby manipulatable, version of experience, a version which is domesticated and protected from contamination.”
