The Cube, at Scale (updated)

https://hdl.handle.net/10779/DRO/DU:30495545

figure

posted on 2025-11-05, 03:23 authored by Eleanor SuessEleanor Suess

History

Location

ASC Gallery, The Chaplin Centre, Taplow House, London

Open access

Notes

In 2021, after nearly a year of lockdowns, a collection of timber studs and cementitious panels that had been stored in a corner of the communal spaces in Suess’s studio complex became transformed into the Cube Gallery. An iteration of the late architect/artist Ken Taylor’s 4 x m2 Gallery Pavilion, the Cube Gallery was placed in a double height atrium in the centre of the studio complex, to become a site for the studio tenants to share their work with each other. While having a strong sculptural presence, the structure has a life of its own with its ‘interiority’ allowing artworks to change in the 1m2 windows. The Cube at Scale (2021) responds to the artefact of the pavilion—the construction of a mise en abyme of recursive model replicas draws this original 1:1 artefact into the work. The first model was 1:5, filling one of the 1m2 vitrine windows of the pavilion gallery, and this scale afforded the model construction a direct tectonically analogical relationship to the 1:1 version—balsa was sawn and connected using nails and pins in holes made with a jeweller’s micro drill bit. As the recursion reduced the respective scales to 1:25, 1:125, and finally 1:625, the modelmaking process abstracted out the tectonics of its precursor, and halted at a version 4mm wide, this miniature enchanting to the human viewer but crude to the mechanical eye of the camera. Each model was a model of the version one scale larger, not the original at 1:1, and therefore took that other model as the primary reference. A relocation of this installation to another 4 x m2 Gallery Pavilion (at Ken’s studio in Peckham) severed the link to the Cube Gallery ‘original’, thereby causing the first recursive element to be lost. However, this move instead established a more complex relationship to the model-like artefact of the gallery pavilion, sharing many formal and spatial qualities of its new home, but with different external cladding materials (which changed over the duration of the exhibition). In 2022, the 1:5 model (with mise en abyme) was selected for inclusion for the m2 Artists: Recent Work exhibition at the ASC Gallery in Peckham. For this exhibition, Suess updated the piece, developing it to work as a standalone sculpture, positioned on a plinth, viewable from all sides. This latest iteration constituted a new work – the updated model now contains a 1:20 gallery room being through its centre. The Cube at Scale (updated) was also included in Suess’s solo exhibition Projective Artefacts at Five Walls Gallery, Melbourne, November-December 2023, and 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. [The above text includes material published in: E. Suess, ‘Uncanny Doubling – The Architectural Model Explored Through Mise En Abyme’, Idea Journal, 21(1), 116-151, 2024.]

Extent

1:5 timber and card model, with recursive model replicas, 1:20 model galley, and model exhibition.

Start date

2022-04-28

End date

2022-05-19

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. Suess’s critical presentation of this work and its findings was selected for inclusion in several peer reviewed, academic publications.