The Forest of Ice

These are a couple shots of a mini installation I created for Art Mini. This guy in NY had the incredibly genius idea of creating tiny galleries where in artists could create their own Installation piece, and because they are only 9x12 inches, budget or time constraints are not an issue. My piece, "The Forest of Ice" wound up being a diorama with the characters and the elements being flat cut out painted forms glued to a frame of balsa wood. The idea in it's most basic form came to me while I was putting together an actual sized installation piece in Robocon (May, 06) While working on putting that thing together I came up with a lot of stuff, mostly the result of problem solving. "The Forest of Ice" was originally intended to be a life size room-filling installation that a person could move through and interact with, but would be lit and viewed best from a couple vantage points (of course indicated by feet silhouettes painted on the floor) however, when the opportunity to make a tiny version came up, I absolutely had to. As someone who has done a lot of paintings, I've been interested for a long time in illusions or 3D space and combining 2D objects with depth in a field. I think it's the overlapping edges and the difficulty the human eye has in focusing on multiple items at once that makes the diorama as a system interesting to me. Of course it could be something far simpler, an homage to hastily prepared elementary school book report visuals made from construction paper, scotch tape and old shoe boxes, or even the older attractions at Disneyland like "Mr. Toads Wild Ride" and "Small World" where plywood painted with highlights and drop shadows make an almost believable stand-in for a 3D forms.