Small Walls

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posted on 2025-10-31, 04:34 authored by Eleanor SuessEleanor Suess

Small Walls<p></p>

History

Location

Five Walls Gallery, Melbourne

Notes

Small Walls (2023) was produced for Suess’s solo exhibition Projective Artefacts at Five Walls Gallery, Melbourne, November-December 2023, and was exhibited in the window of the gallery, the model’s windows against those of their full-sized original. The 1:15 model contains a replica of itself, which contains its own replica. In addition to this mise en abyme, the exhibition within the 1:15 Small Walls model in Projective Artefacts contains the model of the Little Lethaby model, referring back to the earlier work in Suess’s ongoing “Curious Cabinets: the wonderous model gallery and its uncanny mise en abyme” transdisciplinary project. The model exhibition also included some of the work from the Little Lethaby exhibitions (by Suess and others), the Cube at Scale interior exhibition, and model casts produced by past Deakin architecture students. Small Walls was also included in the Form | Shadow | Space: Analogical Perceptual Artefacts, joint exhibition by Eleanor Suess and Maycon Sedrez, at the Waterfront Gallery, Deakin University, Geelong Waterfront Campus, 26 February - 17 May 2024.

Extent

1:15 paper and card model replica of Galleries 2 and 2a of Five Walls, Footscray, with recursive model replicas and model exhibition.

Start date

2023-11-15

End date

2023-12-09

Research statement

Background This work is part of Suess’s “Curious Cabinets: the wonderous model gallery and its uncanny mise en abyme” transdisciplinary project which references the conventions and techniques of the architectural scale model, and that of artistic practices of sculpture and installation. Building on the Wunderkammer, or Cabinet of Curiosities (as the precursor to the contemporary museum and gallery), this project uses the artefact of a model gallery, housing its own recursive replicas and situated within its full-sized original, to encourage a critical understanding in the viewer of the complex relationship between representational artefacts and their referents. Contribution The scale replica gallery turns an architectural model into a sculptural artefact, establishing a dialogue with the full-sized original in which it is situated, and with its own replica within, and the one within that. In drawing attention to the relationship between exhibit and room, the work speaks to the nature of architectural representation, its relationship to a material “reality”, and the perceptual processes that take place in a viewer’s mind when they “read” such representational artefacts. The recursive models of models further destabilise these readings – the uncanny nature of the mise en abyme afford the viewer an increased level of engagement. Significance As an exhibited artwork, the wondrous nature (Jozwiak 2021) of the hand-made model supports the dissemination of the work’s critical subject to a broad, and frequently non-expert, audience. The recursive iteration injects humour, while also disrupting established understandings of representational artefacts, affording a level of engagement, interpretation, understanding, and critical response appropriate to each viewer, building upon the knowledges, experiences and understanding they bring to the work.

Event

Projective Artefacts, a solo exhibition by Eleanor Suess

Publisher

Five Walls Gallery, Melbourne

Place of publication

Melbourne

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Keywords

Architectural representation Mise en abyme Uncanny Architectural models Embodied cognition