A man stands in a church, straddling the elaborate miniature landscape of a tiny Nativity scene. He is leaning on a mop with its bottom so lost among figurines that the handle looks like a wooden staff and the man like a tired traveler–the fourth Magus, maybe, or even, when compared to the tiny plastic inhabitants of the world that he maintains, God.
It’s a striking image, and it serves as the opener and introduction to “Perfectible Worlds,” Sage Sohier’s solo show on view at Foley Gallery. Many of Sohier’s works exploit the strange dynamic that turns men into giants when placed next to their miniature creations. She has become adept at plumbing the weird blend of delicacy, precision, and megalomania that causes people to build minute models of real-world phenomena. She shows us the face of a man warped through the bottle in which he is assiduously constructing a ship, Joe Fig building a tiny version of Chuck Close and studio within his own studio, and a dark hand wiping clean the glass of a museum diorama.
Close examinations of miniatures aren’t uncommon in photography. 291 recently covered Laurie Simmons’s use of figurines; Lori Nix regularly uses miniatures, as do Paolo Ventura and countless others. All these artists produce great work, but Sohier’s special angle–which she works very handily–is the visual juxtaposition of the little with the larger, of the “perfectible world” with the faces and hands of those who control it. This focus leads her to subjects that look, at first, as though they don’t belong. Among miniature sailboats, cities, and studios, there are other pictures: a family preparing their little girl to show a horse, a Revolutionary War re-enactor resting against a tree, a bodybuilder posing in a parking lot. Though the preponderance of to-scale models makes the show a bit misleading, the work is strong enough to make the metaphorical leap from miniatures to muscle men. Sohier’s excellent sense of color, composition, and humor holds the series together, buttressing the thesis that unites it: that all the photographs demonstrate different outlets of the human need for some area of complete dominance.
Nevertheless, her approach to image making is hardly conventional. Any one subject in the show may have resulted in a traditional photographic series–covering miniatures, or re-enactors, or bodybuilders. It may be best not to think of Sohier’s approach as that of a photographer at all, but rather that of a curator. If photographers traditionally explore a single subject to produce a deep and cohesive body of work, curators select and arrange disparate single works around a unifying theme, producing order and narrative where there was none before. Sohier manages this task with aplomb, effectively asserting the right of the photographer to act as a curator of psychological moments, rather than being stuck with the beat of a reporter, dryly documenting the nuances of any particular individual or community.
“Perfectible Worlds” runs through August 15, 2008. All images © Sage Sohier.
