A trim’s little2024.
Photo: Courtesy of Hashimoto Contemporary and Abigail Goldman
Abigail Goldman’s Micro-Rrenderenges of Scenes of Carnage, Created at 1:87 Scale, Are a Testament to the Pull of the Small, Especilantly at A Time Is Getting Bigger and More Elaborately Produced. In one tableau that it is could have come out of Breaking badA Shipping Storage Container in a Gravel Field Contains a Bloody Corpse and a Woman with Her Hands As Two Gunmen Nearby take Aim. Another features a powder-blue van in a desert and two men warming their hands over an oil-drum fire, a mutilated corpse splayed between. A Third Features a Machine-Gun-Ting Queen Elizabeth and Her Two Corgis Standing Over a Dead Man. Beind Her, The Paintings, the China in the Cabinet, The Upholstered Chairs, The Patterned Wallpaper – All Are Perfect.
Goldman calls her work “die-o-rama.” I call a cross between nightmares, documentary, and horror. In Her Day Job, she is an investigator for a public deferender outside seattle, researching horrendous incidents of Death, Murder, and Suicide. She starts MAKING the DIE-ORAMAS IN 2012. One day, Her Husband Posted Images of Her Work on Social Media, where it attracted 15,000 comments. While she’s swimming known in the art world, her work is now widly colllated (one of her die-o-rama globes is priced atly $ 700), and she’s ben Featured in the New York Times and eve a short Documentary About Her Practice.
Her New Show, “State of Nature,At the Hashimoto Contemporary Gallery, is Remminiscent of Science-Fair Displays and Natural-History Exhibitions. I love miniature, mad-scientist world like and follow instagram accounts devoted to teeny record albums, dolls, and cars, and touti, and tin. Prepared in tiny kitchens with tiny tools.
But, of Course, there is a Long Lineage of Artists Working in Wee Spaces. Lori Nix Creates Mad Slum Scenes, Destroyed Libraries, and Postapocalyptic Living Rooms. Joe fig has done small replicas of the Studios of Jackson Pollock, April Gornik, Chuck Close, and Other Artists. Janet Cardiff Has Included Models of Haunted Houses in Her Elaborate Exibrations. A MasterPiece of the Genre is skewer, By Jake and Dinos Chapman, a series of containers configured in the Shape of a swastika depictting thusands of nazis impaled, tortured, and torn apart by tiny demons.
Goldman’s Grotesque Scenes Are often Set in Subtle Locations. The Window of a Suburban Home Reveals a naked Woman in a Chair and, in the Darkness Beyond HER, A DEAD MAN ON THE FLOOR. One die-o-rama features a man taking a picture of a Woman Posing topless in disheveled woods. I’m skeptical wen things get really Bloody. These pieces spil over intoo -farce, melodrama, parody. A Restaurant Shows a Batch of Happy Diners while in the Kitchen, someone is cutting up a dead body. Its like the Movie The menu. There are deCapitations, bodies bodies, pools of Blood everywhere. I ALSO DON’T LOVE The Way the Viewer is held at a distance by plexiglass encases.
But the best of her ghoulish work has the Feeing of Films Like Fargo or The Florida Project, A Nether Zone Where is intricately suspended in its atmosphere and restrained to the point that it is comes acroSs as fiction in the guise of documents. These are works that make us feel a true american horror story.
