It feels like the right time to curate a show around the theme of world-building, as we have been thrust into an era of history where understanding the world you want is being challenged and destroyed. It’s right to think about how things work as it begins to expand your imagination as to what can be when it needs repair. I feel like so many thoughtful and intellectual thinkers around me, people I trust, keep speaking of how to organize and understand ourselves during these times of despair and destruction so that we can rebuild a world that we all want to live in once the chance arises to construct a meaningful, new infrastructure. The pendulum will swing back, and I trust this.
As this is the case, artist Elliott Hundley has curated a 32-artist group show, Model World, at Tierra del Sol Gallery in Los Angeles, the landmark outsider art space that has, since 1971, focused on supporting adults with disabilities through “creative pathways to employment, education, and the arts.” Literally, world builders themselves, the gallery has invited Hundley to think in the same vein, to think of themes that “brings together diverse voices to examine models, miniatures, and imagined worlds as ways of understanding, shaping, and rethinking the present moment.” It’s challenging in the moment to find some sort of positivity, but in Model World, a space has been made to think of the potential of something better.
“Miniatures, blueprints, maps, and models are ways of holding the world in our hands,” Hundley says. “They help us plan and design, speculate and explain, teach and imagine, play and remember, memorialize and make sense of what might otherwise feel elusive. Theorists have long tried to understand our desire to shrink the world into legible form. For Gaston Bachelard, these acts invite poetic reverie and imaginative immersion; for Susan Stewart, they summon nostalgia and the promise of control; for Umberto Eco, the miniature offers the seductive illusion of ‘perfect knowledge,’ a momentary grasp of the whole.”
The show features artists from outside the Tierra del Sol Gallery program in conjunction with those inside. There’s a fascinating result. Some artists work from memory, others from fantasy, some looking at realism and others almost surreal. David Romero paints the city as observed from above, where Joe Zaldivar examines our electoral maps. Many artists built ceramics. The worlds feel imperfect but open, and Hundley remarks that the works depicts “a world within a world within a world (that) overflows with detail, contradiction, and meaning.”
It’s hard at times to think positively, even looking to the future for what can be, but Model World is a reminder that many of things we value are still around us, have been unearthed before and will be unearthed again. Maybe we need to be patient, but the blueprint is still here. —Evan Pricco
