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Japanese artist and photographer Miwa Yanagi constructs elaborate nightmarish black & white life-size dioramas. Into some of them she introduces a live human figure who must hold their pose with perfect stillness for hours at a time.

 

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The idea of using forced perspective to depict a Redwood forest came from Albert Parr. He had already experimented with forced perspective displays in the Warburg Hall of Ecology and now he suggested it as a way to show the enormous height of the Redwoods without having to construct a huge diorama case. Wilson was greatly intrigued by the idea. Here, he could expand his gridding methods more fully into three dimensions, but an oddly, compressed three dimensions that piqued his interest mathematically. Forced perspective has some elements similar to the anamorphic buffalo Wilson painted on the oblique side wall in the Bison diorama. What is different in the Redwood group is that the anamorphism is sculptural as well as graphic, so in a sense, Wilson was combining a kind of bas relief sculptural compression with flat, two dimensional distortions to pull off an illusion of deep space and great height. This can be seen especially in the tree trunks. The nearest trunk is a flattened curve maybe 12″ deep with three-dimensional detail in the bark. The color is close to the actual color of the tree. The next tree back is flattened further approximately 6″ deep with no three-dimensional detail. All detail such as the bark is painted. The color of the trunk shifts to a cooler gray to enhance the receding perspective. The most distant tree is completely flat and painted in cooler colors yet.

 

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‘Bellingham, Washington-based artist and criminal defense investigator Abigail Goldman is known for her innovative “dieoramas”. These are miniature crime scenes that initially appear charming. But when the viewer looks at them closely, they realise that the diminutive figures within each piece are holding weapons, lying in pools of blood or standing in a kitchen, serving body parts for breakfast. What first seems to be a generic suburban family setting unfolds into a macabre tableau where miniature mayhem reigns.’

 

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Niagara Wax Museum of History

 

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Exploding car

 

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Alois Kronschlaeger Moose Diorama
Utilizing the habitat dioramas in the Mammal Hall of the former Grand Rapids Public Museum, I have created a site-specific installation, juxtaposing the existing landscapes of 27 dioramas built in the mid-20th century with contemporary architectural intervention.

 

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Defunct dioramas @ American Museum of Natural History (1937 – 1944)

 

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A miniature tabletop diorama created by photographer Bill Finger, who builds then destroys them after taking photos.

 

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Glitched is a series of 3D printed dioramas in smoked glass cubes by artist Mathieu Schmitt. The artist allows for the 3D model data to become corrupt in such a way that objects are printed slightly deformed.

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TITANIC breakup, sinking and wreck DIORAMA. I love it, but my one big criticism is the lack of the hundreds of people on the decks and in the water around the sinking ship. One mustn’t forget just how many people died on that night.

 

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La boite verte

 

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Boba Fett met his doom upon the sands of Tatooine in Return of the Jedi. He fell into the Great Pit of Carkoon into the mouth of the fearful and if we’re being honest, really gross, Sarlacc. It’s an awful fate that means he’ll be kept alive and slowly digested for over a thousand years. Stories in Star Wars Legends have resurrected Boba Fett by claiming he managed to crawl out of the pit and avoid being consumed by the Sarlacc, but LEGO builder Daniel Stoeffler has come up with another idea and he brought his story to life with a massive, detailed diorama.

 

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Stripper diorama

 

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Michael Jackson on Fire Diorama

 

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David Hoffos Scenes from the House Dream (2010)
Shoebox-sized dioramas were shoved into the walls, stages that, in many cases contained interior scenes of bedrooms and living rooms. What could be an intricate, static presentation of domesticity past—many of these scenes recall a mid-20th century aesthetic—Hoffos has transformed into a compelling non-site by merging the past with present. Scenes from the House Dream revels in visual tricks, thin video projections of human figures flickering in and out of the unmoving sets. The landscape in Hoffos’ installation extends beyond tiny rooms that you can peer into like at a caged animal in a zoo exhibit, but the handmade quasi-futuristic rooms are the most affective part of his installation. These human projections, trapped in a video loop inside these small rooms are left to perform banal, repetitive actions—Sisyphean tasks.

 

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Burning tank

 

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A few shots of the small lakeshore habitat diorama for the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore and State Park Nature Center near Chesterton, IN.

 

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Bloodbath Zombie Diorama finally finished and dry! Paul thinks she needs nipples…I just feel weird about it…I don’t know why…I guess I just don’t feel like zombies need to be anatomically correct. It took me months to get this diorama done. I had the bathtub out and the barbies face painted forever. Just staring at me all sad and what not. So I tried a new thing for the blood in the tub. Its the stuff that you pour into vases for fake flowers to simulate water. I added red food coloring and it came out really coagulated and gross looking, not clear red like I was expecting but more like real blood. Everyone that I’ve shown it to has had the same reaction “eww, thats really gross” or when I show my co-workers “you’re so weird”. Thats pretty much the emotion I was looking to invoke so I guess I’m pleased with the results.

 

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The Nemesis Machine

 

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How do you re-create the moon shadows seen on a snowy December night? That was the challenge artist Stephen C. Quinn faced when new energy-efficient lights were installed in the wolf diorama, creating new shadows that weren’t consistent with the scene.

 

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Lori Nix’s project The City portrays a world where some disaster has caused humans to depart for an unseen destination. What’s left behind are dilapidated structures art museums, theaters, laundromats, bars, libraries that no longer function and are slowly being reclaimed by Mother Nature. Nix and her partner Kathleen Gerber construct dioramas in her Brooklyn apartment of each idea by hand, using a variety of materials. When the diorama is finished, Nix brings in her camera and photographs it.

 

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Unexplained Death Dioramas from the 1940s

 

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5 miniature dioramas by Alex Makarenko

 

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Norway 1943 Crash Site

 

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Australian artist Mark Powell’s dioramas are populated with monstrous characters going about their business, eating, dissecting things and even playing music in dark and disturbing basements. The Australian artist models every one of his gory dioramas from silicone, which gives all the veiny monsters and pieces of flesh a disturbing organic look.

 

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Pennsylvania 1935

 

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Nicolas Cabaret Tsushima II (2010)

 

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Wildfire
Diorama made from wood, moss, yellow glitter, clear garbage bags, cooked sugar, scotch-brite pot scrubbers, bottle brushes, clipping from a bush in bloom (white flowers) clear thread, sand, tile grout (coloring), wire, paper and alternating yellow, red and orange party bulbs.

 

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Adolf Hitler Office Diorama

 

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The Indian Crow Bison Hunt, which was the largest open diorama in the world when it opened in 1966, contains a tiny secret whose discovery has become a quintessential part of the Milwaukee experience. A hidden button makes the rattlesnake in the diorama shake its tail. Do you know where the snake button is?

 

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Untitled #5

 

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Baba Yaga

 

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Jake & Dinos Chapman The Sum of all Evil (2012-2013)
Monumental in scope and minute in detail, The Sum of all Evil occupied the entire ground floor of the gallery and is the most densely imagined diorama installation that the artists have produced to date. The fourth in a series of Hell landscapes – the first and most well known of which, Hell (1999), was destroyed in a warehouse fire – the work features a multitude of intricately modelled Nazi soldiers, along with various characters from the fast food chain McDonald’s, committing violent, abhorrent acts set amid an apocalyptic landscape within four glass vitrines.

 

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Diorama Kursk

 

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Diorama artist and photographer Jonah Samson’s sex-driven miniatures are controversy writ small.

 

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Visitors to the American Museum of Natural History’s popular Butterfly Conservatory could be forgiven a moment’s confusion when they enter the exhibit through an archway marked ‘Birds of the Pacific.’ A framed mayoral proclamation, signed by Ed Koch in 1989, hangs on the wall by the entrance. It commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the museum’s Whitney Wing “and its two public exhibitions, the Whitney Hall of Oceanic Birds and the Sanford Hall of Bird Life, which have enlightened millions of students, scholars, and visitors from around the world and will continue to be sources of knowledge and enjoyment for generations to come.” Neither hall, however, really exists any more. The Sanford hall was dismantled in 1999 to make room for an expansion of the planetarium, and the Whitney hall’s fate is ambiguous: like an abandoned subway station, it can be glimpsed, but is mostly hidden. Ten of its eighteen dioramas are concealed behind the conservatory’s cocoon-shaped enclosure.

 

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Mimicafe Union The Hogwarts Dining Hall (2013)
This is a collaboration with cake decorators from around the world. All pieces are made from Fondant Sugar paste and everything is a hand made creation.

 

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In Berlin’s DDR Museum, overexposed dioramas of nudist beaches are arrayed alongside Spreewald pickles and squat “Trabbi” cars as nostalgic emblems of life in the former communist state. This splash of apparent free-spiritedness contrasts oddly with the drabness and rigidity generally associated with the Stasi state, and it is conventional to conclude that East German nudism was a rare instance of tolerated individualism in an otherwise repressive society. The Party could police your speech, your diet, your social status, your job – but in our state of nature we belong only to ourselves.

 

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On April 8, 2000, Mark Hogancamp was attacked by five men and left for dead outside of a bar in Kingston, NY. After nine days in a coma, he awoke to find he had no memory of his previous adult life. He had to relearn how to eat, walk and write. When his state-sponsored rehabilitative therapies ran out, Mark took his recovery into his own hands. In his backyard, he created a new world entirely within his control – a 1:6 scale World War II town he named Marwencol. Using doll alter egos of his friends and family, his attackers and himself, Mark enacted epic battles and recreated memories, which he captured in strikingly realistic photographs. Those photos eventually caught the eye of the art world, which lead to a series of gallery exhibitions, an award-winning documentary, a book, and a new identity for a man once ridiculed for playing with dolls.

 

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POW Camp diorama, South Korea

 

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Sam Durant Scenes from the Pilgrim Story: Myths, Massacres and Monuments (2010)

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Dustin, Hi. Thanks for those links. Very helpful for an initiate. Have an interesting one. ** Steeqhen, Hi. Nice haul. GbV! Do laptop batteries swell up?! That’s spooky. ** Carsten, Paris isn’t cramped. Well, compared to an open field it is. See, I find villages overly cramped. I only drove through New Orleans once and didn’t get any kind of feel for it. The heat/humidity would keep me far away, or at least for a bulk of the year. The Jack Smith was great, of course, kind of maybe overly meandering but nuts and exciting as always with him. ** Steve, That’s my favorite Ochs phase too. Jake Shears getting his ass eaten might be why I continue to avoid it, haha. The Jack Smith was ‘Mr. President’. It’s sort of extremely loosely about Wendell Wilkie, a name/person I hadn’t thought about since I was a child. I guess the film was banned for a long time. Lots of penis and masturbating. Very worth seeing like all Jack Smiths. ** _Black_Acrylic, Howdy! ** Hi! Henry Cow covering Phil Ochs! This I have to hear. Weird. Everyone, courtesy of Dr. Kosten Koper, here’s the great experimental/progressive 70s band Henry Cow doing a live cover version of Phil Ochs’s ‘No More Songs’. Thanks! ** Lucas, No, thank you! It was and remains an honor. I saw Phil Ochs live once in the late 60s when I was a young teen. My family was visiting NYC, and I read that there was anti-war concert at a local venue where Bob Dylan was supposed to be the unannounced performer. So I broke away from my family and went, and it turned out not to be Dylan but Phil Ochs, much to the tenable disappointment of the crowd, but he was great. My weekend was fine, not hugely eventful. The name Anatoly Moskvin rings a bell, but, no, I didn’t know about that. Wow. I’ll obviously look into that. That’s wild. ** Jeff J, Great talking with you too. Okay, I’ll find your email and respond straight away. Will do re: the EP. ** HaRpEr //, That trilogy of albums are really good, especially ‘Pleasures of the Harbour’ for me. I’ve never taken anti-depressants, but I know from friends who have/do that they can take weeks to settle. Hopefully that’s it. It’s not insanity, I feel pretty confident in thinking that. ** kenley, No, I don’t listen to music when I’m actually writing, but all around writing, for sure. And the memory of how the music I’m into at the time works/sounds is definitely an influence. I just can’t concentrate with organised sounds in the background. So, yeah, to get in the mood, for sure. And also books I’m reading too if I’m excited by them and anxious to see what happens if I try to do something similar. Laxness? That’s the writer’s name? I don’t know who that is, but I’ll go find out. Thanks. Are you working on new music? ** Laura, Awesome that you’re into Tim Dlugos. He was an influence on my writing as well as one of my closest friends. I haven’t read Ivo Andrić. Not sure if I will based on your report. Favorite words? For a long my favorite word was infuriate, but I don’t think it is anymore. I really like words and phrases that French people use all the time, like ‘Ah bon?’ I like them because they’re so simple seeming but I can’t fully understand what the speaker means when they use them. No, ideally the script will begin its final polish this week. I’m still waiting for Zac’s input. <3 you too. ** Uday, I’m kind of with Lucas on Ochs’s suicide while recognising it will always be mysterious. Get some sleep. Luck on the tentative good post-grad news. Share if/when that cements. It’s cold here but not scary cold. I just need a buttoned up coat with a hood (for when it rains) and a scarf at the moment. I still have all these ridiculously thick, huge, warm clothes I bought when I went to Antartica, so I can throw those on if it comes to that, although they make me look a crazy person. ** darbz (⊙ _ ⊙ ), Hi. Yeah, we’ll see about the NC screening, but it’s possibly in the works. There’s some theater in Charlotte that might be interested, but I don’t remember its name. Oh, man, so much luck with the court appearance. Do you feel fairly confident? xo. ** Okay. I thought I would bring back a bunch of dioramas for you to look at today. See you tomorrow.