Meredith James
Matryoshka Show
June 25 - July 22, 2016
A matryoshka doll, also known as a Russian nesting doll, or Russian doll, is a set of wooden dolls of decreasing size placed one inside another. The "matryoshka principle" or "nested doll principle" is a design paradigm donating a recognizable relationship of "object-within-similar-object" that appears in the design of many natural and crafted objects.
On the wall of the gallery James has painted an anamorphic mural of the viewer's face. Peering through the face from the outside into the gallery the viewer is confronted by a miniaturized version of themselves peering into the same gallery onto progressively smaller and smaller versions of the same scene. This process of the viewer viewing themselves continues indefinitely becoming increasingly distorted with each scale shift. As in the effect of a double mirror, the show is simultaneously empty and filled with infinite, progressively smaller versions of the viewer looking.
