‘Smaller Than a Breadbox’
Durango Arts Center presents miniature exhibit

Maureen May’s piece "Retrieving the Hand, Reviving the Heart,” is the artist’s attmept to “get back to the basics” after a two-year dry spell./Photo by David Halterman

by Jules Masterjohn

To call yourself an artist is to identify with a broader community of creators around the world and throughout time. Some produce items to decorate and complement interior spaces, to beautify and accent; others document their surroundings using varying styles of expression, recording what they see; several more call into existence objects that give substance to our understandings of the world, making meaning from experience. In art’s service to humanity, it fulfils numerous functions and feeds many aspects of human nature. Artists create food for our souls.

The exhibit “Smaller Than a Breadbox,” currently on display at the Durango Arts Center’s Art Library, offers a range of visual sustenance for the hungry spirit. Thirteen individuals, of whom I am one, were invited by the organizers to create small works, no larger than 12 inches in any direction, for the miniature-themed exhibit.

The small size and differing approaches from each artist make this show delicious. For some, working small proved to be a new flavor as larger visions were translated into smaller objects, considering how scale can inform the power of art.

For Grace and Quatro Kruse, two young craftspeople who work with altered and fused Pyrex glass, the size of their work naturally fits the theme of the show. Their functional pieces, Grace’s two goblets with idealized female torsos as stems and Quatro’s amorphous ocean blue bottle, fulfill the basic need we humans have to hold – and behold – sensual materials, making objects for pleasure.

Tipping his hat to the invitation to play with scale, Ed Bolster produced slip cast ceramic reproductions of a harmonica and a vile, both set on a block base. Licked by the flames, the surface of the ceramic still life is pink and crusty, looking like an archaeological find from 2,000 years in the future.

Debra Greenblatt offers a visual diary, “The Game of Life: June 1 - October 28, 2007.” Her layered plexiglass-and-game-board construction documents her daily activities and thoughts, told in tiny sketches of symbols, icons and personal imagery. From dollar signs and paintbrushes to a toilet, she tells all. This piece hints at the multidimensional navigations undertaken in our busy lives.

The toy theme is shared by Amy Wendland, whose clever sculpture, “Unstill Life (Homage to Morandi),” takes on the format of one of Wendland’s signature pull toys. Beautifully crafted in wood and polymer clay, then intricately painted, the sculpture is accompanied by small studies of Morandi’s paintings, in case the viewer needs a point of reference. The grid on the sculpture’s base, which allows each object to move about, suggests that there may be puzzling permutations to how the vases may be arranged.

Sandra Butler created two botanical sculptures, “Extrovert” and “Introvert,” each made using rawhide, wire and sand. The inner parts of her plant-inspired forms seem to play peak-a-boo with the viewer. She offers, “My usual approach to making sculpture is to enlarge tiny imagery I find in nature. The process of working small felt very vulnerable to me, like I was the one being looked at under a microscopic. Every detail of the small work becomes an element for scrutiny.”

Like Butler, Maureen May makes reference to close examination in her mixed-media sculpture, “Retrieving the Hand, Reviving the Heart.” A most enigmatic assemblage made from a soldering stand covered in tiny text, with its clamps holding the pieces of a ripped and sewn together drawing of May’s hand. All of the pieces are positioned under a magnifying glass and illuminated by a small light. May reveals her love for the interplay of materials and processes, and their associated meanings.

A self-portrait of the artist’s recent challenges, May reveals, “Basically the last two years have been an artistic dry spell, not that I didn’t have ideas, but I couldn’t get myself moving. I’ve been sketching a lot, so I decided to go back to my basics, and I drew my hand to just get myself started.” A quote by Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu wraps around the magnifying glass and reads, “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.”

The exhibit’s size limitation didn’t hinder Mike Brieger from pushing the boundaries with his collection of eight drawings, “Outside the Box,” – a nod to the works’ slightly oversized dimensions of 12-by-16-inches. One particularly peculiar drawing states “Be gentle with her, she learned the accordion on the back of an alligator” and demonstrates Brieger’s characteristic child-like drawing style combined with his absurd wit. The drawing pictures a woman and a human-sized keyboard with keys resembling the woman’s large bare breasts – both are standing on top of the swamp creature’s back.

Judy Brey’s clay figurine “Tiny Dancer” hangs on the wall near Brieger’s gator, whose claws resemble the Brey’s dancer’s toes, making for a delightfully odd connection. Brey handles her medium, terra cotta clay and colored underglazes, in an intentionally raw and direct manner. This allows us to see her technical process and emphasizes the tender and slightly distorted modeling of the small leaping woman. There is whimsy in this gracefully awkward figure.

Joan Levine Russell presents a preliminary study for her painting “Sacrifice.” Her patterned and complimentary color-filled composition looks like the large oil painting based upon it, though she adds, “The nature of this small gouache is quite different in feel from the final painting which is 5-by-7-feet, even though, compositionally, it is the same. Small work is a lot more personal and intimate for both the artist to make and the viewer to view.”

Small works present a large opportunity for the viewer to get close to art and “see” from the artist’s perspective. This show proves that though small is not always beautiful, it can be entirely engaging. •

“Smaller Than a Breadbox” is on display through December in the Art Library, upstairs at the Durango Arts Center, 802 E. Second Ave. Viewing hours are generally from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.–Sat.