 "Photo: Courtesy Martha Papadimitriou")
Like that beautiful, delicate dollhouse you were never allowed to play with as a child, the new exhibition at the Mexic-Arte Museum on Congress Avenue is a museum within a museum, centered on artwork of miniature proportions.
As the name suggests, "The Huge & the Small" is comprised of two separate galleries. The first, more traditional and comparatively "life-sized," houses 21 separate works of art by Latin American artists. The second gallery is the hub of the exhibition's wheel. Within the confines of an 8-by-8 foot box, curator Martha Papadimitriou created an entire itty bitty museum chock-full of bite-sized sculptures, paintings and installations - so small, in fact, that one piece exists on the screen of an iPod Nano.
Each work of art within Papadimitriou's piece, "La Caja" - meaning "the box" - is by artists whose work can also be found in "The Huge" museum. Many of the pieces inside "La Caja" are similar, if not nearly identical, to their larger counterparts, but are not intended to be microcosms in the least. Each piece of artwork in the large gallery is self-contained and separate from any surrounding pieces, while the pieces in "La Caja" are significant only in conversation with the mini-museum altogether.
In being so small, "La Caja" is intended to address the human desire to dominate an object and the interest in all things dainty. Instead of standing in front of a display, experiencing "La Caja" is more like stepping into an actual museum. Everything may be bigger in Texas, but (almost) everything at Mexic-Arte is much, much smaller.
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