Toys and Scale

In school we often rely on scale figures in our models and drawings to communicate relative size of the things we make. There is playfulness in these figures that is reminiscent of Stewarts writing about the dollhouse. Stewart on page 62 states, “ As private property marked by the differentiations of privacy and privatizing functions (bathrooms, maids’ rooms, dining rooms, halls, parlors, and chambers) and characterized by attention to ornaments and detail to the point of excruciation (the hand of the artisan, the eye of the beholder), the dollhouse erases all but the frontal view; its appearance is the realization of the self as property, the body as container of objects, perpetual and incontaminable.” These models are my dollhouses. This project in particular asked us to work with an elephant as our occupant in order to confront the inevitable need for large mass and big spaces.

These are the first two photos I ever took with a film camera. Although they are quite literally toys, they are also embedded into a large concrete wall structure. The wall is overgrown with plants, algae, and other toys are compacted onto its face. There is a darkness in this structure that relates to the duality of toys and youth as discussed in The Darker Side of Playland. To me it talks about ideas of nostalgia and change, almost like an inevitable decay over time.

Project: Waiting Windows by Note Design Studio Photos by Erik Lefvander

The Stockholm-based Note Design Studio recently completed an outdoor art installation of varying-sized stainless-steel structures set on a wooded hillside. This installation, titled ‘Waiting Windows’, is a meditation on the time in life that we spend waiting. The site-specific installation is said to be a sculptural study of the ‘dead time’ between the anticipation and the event. Daniel Hecksher, the interior architect for the firm, writes about waiting as a poetic frame of mind but that it’s often considered something of a void in our daily lives. I really enjoy the duality of the mirror in this sculpture as both a literal and physical expansion of landscape. The mirror is almost seamless as it sits in the landscape but the view of the reflected is superimposed into a singular plane, or image. I think time is an important component to scale and as it relates to closure in the miniature and infinity in the gigantic.