A little trim2024.
Photo: Courtesy of Hashimoto Contemporary and Abigail Goldman
Abigail Goldman’s 1:87 scale micro-renderings of carnage scenes are a testament to the appeal of the small, especially in an age when art is produced ever larger and more elaborately. In a tableau that consists of breaking Bada shipping container in a gravel field contains a bloody corpse and a woman with her hands raised as two gunmen take aim nearby. Another shows a powder-blue van in a desert and two men warming their hands over an oil drum fire, a mutilated corpse lying between them. A third shows a Queen Elizabeth armed with a machine gun and her two corgis standing over a dead man. Behind her are the paintings, the china in the cabinet, the upholstered chairs, the patterned wallpaper – everything is perfect.
Goldman calls her works “Die-o-ramas.” I call them a mix of nightmare, documentary, and horror. Her day job is as an investigator for a public defender outside of Seattle, researching gruesome cases of death, murder, and suicide. She began working on the Die-o-ramas in 2012. One day, her husband posted pictures of her work on social media, where she received 15,000 comments. Although she is not well known in the art world, her work is now collected by many collectors (one of her Die-o-rama snow globes costs just $700) and she has been featured in the New York Times. Just and even a short documentary about her practice.
Her new show “State of Nature,“” at the Hashimoto Contemporary Gallery is reminiscent of exhibits at science fairs and natural history shows. I love miniature mad scientist worlds like this one, and follow numerous Instagram accounts devoted to tiny records, dolls and cars, and tiny foods prepared in tiny kitchens with tiny tools. All of this exists outside of the art world. When I told a close friend that I was reviewing Goldman’s show, she asked, “Why?”
But of course there is a long tradition of artists working in tiny spaces. Lori Nix creates crazy slum scenes, destroyed libraries and post-apocalyptic living rooms. Joe Fig has made small replicas of the studios of Jackson Pollock, April Gornik, Chuck Close and other artists. Janet Cardiff has included models of haunted houses in her lavish exhibitions. A masterpiece of this genre is hell, by Jake and Dinos Chapman, a series of containers in the shape of a swastika depicting thousands of Nazis being impaled, tortured, and torn to pieces by tiny demons.
Goldman’s grotesque scenes often take place in unremarkable places. The window of a suburban house shows a naked woman in a chair and, in the darkness beyond, a dead man on the floor. In a die-o-rama, a man takes a photograph of a woman posing topless in a wild forest. I am skeptical when things Really bloody. These pieces turn into farce, melodrama, parody. A restaurant shows a group of happy guests while in the kitchen someone is dismembering a corpse. It is like in the film The menu. There are beheadings, buried corpses, pools of blood everywhere. I also don’t like the way the viewer is kept at a distance by means of plexiglass panels.
But their best scary work gives the impression of films like Fargo or The Florida Project, an in-between zone where everything is intricately suspended in its own atmosphere, so restrained that it seems like fiction in the guise of a documentary. These are works that allow us to experience a real American horror story.
