I am fascinated by the fact that almost anything—from telescopes and brownie cameras to hypodermic needles and condoms—can be found in miniature. I’m equally intrigued by what motivates people to collect such tiny replicas of objects from our own material world. As a smaller scale surrogate of the original, the miniature seems to imply the existence of some kind of alternative universe where we—as larger bodies—are like gods, omnipotent and seemingly in control. For this series I photograph my friends and family interacting with miniatures I’ve collected. In the darkroom I enlarge the 35mm color negative so that the previously small objects appear to approximate “normal” or “life-size” scale in the final photograph.
Just as there’s a kind of nostalgia we associate with the family snapshot, the world of the miniature often invokes a more perfect vision of the past. Here, where the miniature parallels our own world, any idyllic memories associated with childhood innocence collide with images of gigantic adult figures attempting to invade the claustrophobic and pretend space of childhood play (the monotony of daily routines and the threat of violence exist even here). Magnification reveals the markings of adult-aged flesh: the chapped hands or dirt under the fingernails born by manual labor or the wrinkles, pores and facial hair of a mature face. Invading a world of Lilliputian crowns and tiny hand grenades, these oversized adults awkwardly attempt to make the once under-sized replicas function as if they were actual working possessions. This intersection of scales disturbs the imagined perfection of a mini-sized fantasy world. As viewers we must rethink our point of view as our sense of natural order is called into question. Humorous and absurd narratives unfold in the process of reconciling and interpreting the disjunctive relationships between large and small, adult and child, work and play, reality and illusion. These photographs draw attention to how we see. They ask the viewer to look beyond the surface and confront the betrayal of appearances. By making images that challenge our expectations, I’m exploring how photographs can be used to manipulate our perceptual experience and, as a result, shape our understanding of the world around us.
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Cynthia Greig lives and works in metropolitan Detroit. She received her MFA in 1995 from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and studied art history and filmmaking at the University of Iowa where she received her MA in 1988. Her photographs, installations and videos have been exhibited at The Alternative Museum and HarvestWorks in New York City, San Francisco Camerawork, Boston Center for the Arts, RedCat Theatre in Los Angeles, Houston Center for Photography, The Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids, MI, SPACES Gallery in Cleveland, OH, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Focal Point Gallery and Margaret Harvey Gallery in England and Gallery 44, Centre for Contemporary Photography in Toronto and Art Gallery of Windsor in Canada. Her work has appeared in publications such Artweek, New Art Examiner, Spot, Photography Quarterly, Contact Sheet Annual, Frankfurter Rundschau and Art Preview. Greig has been awarded grants for filmmaking from The Michigan Council for the Arts and Center for New Television (Chicago). Most recently she was awarded the Assignment Earth prize sponsored by the Santa Fe Center for Photography, the Houston Center for Photography Fellowship in 2002, and an artist residency at Light Work in 2001.
HIGHLIGHTS
2001 LightWork Artist in Residence
2004 Santa Fe Center for Photography, Assignment Earth Award
2004 Frankfurter Rundschau Magazin, “Fokus auf Cynthia Greig,” Oct. 16
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