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He makes a big deal of miniature works
Documentary accompanies exhibit
By Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent | February 27, 2006
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CAMBRIDGE -- Dick Freeman has a chop shop in his basement. All the car parts -- grilles, doors, tires -- are neatly packed in plastic bags and stowed in storage bins. The parts themselves are plastic, and Freeman can hold them in the palm of his hand. He makes car models, and he enjoys switching things up by, say, putting the grille of a 1934 Ford pickup on the front of a 1954 Chevy sedan.
Freeman's handiwork will be featured, along with that of other area miniature makers, in Model Citizens: 42° 22' 12.11" N, 71° 06' 11.45" W, an exhibition organized by artist Michael Oatman that opens today at the Cambridge Arts Council Gallery. The title gives GPS coordinates for the gallery.
Come and you'll see Gregory Bartlett's tiny bedroom that can be worn like a hat, Roger Bisbing's 2-inch-tall folding chairs, Charles Hansen's model-railroad landscapes built into suitcases, and Danny Goodwin's scale models, complete with surveillance systems, of the homes of political figures -- like President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas.
To Oatman, size matters.
''The gallery will be all black, partly because things are small and I want them to stand out," says the artist, sitting on a stepladder in Freeman's kitchen. The final product of Model Citizens will be a documentary about the people who make the models, and Oatman has just finished videotaping the car modeler in his studio. ''Some model makers are being brave and letting me display their work in a way to emphasize its delicateness, to confront you with its potential for harm," he says.
Model Citizens makes its first stop in Cambridge. It's part of the Cambridge Arts Council's Public Art/Moving Site project, which has three exhibits rotating through Cambridge, New Haven, and Bellows Falls, Vt. At each stop, Oatman will incorporate local model makers into the process.
Lillian Hsu, CAC's acting director of public art and organizer of Model Citizens, sees Oatman's show as a new kind of public art.
''He's going into people's homes and making public something people do in private spaces," she says.
''These are all at an intimate scale, all made largely by people who have developed a specialized work space, with specialized materials and tools," Oatman says. He can relate: He's better known for making large-scale collages with the same No. 11 X-acto knife blade Freeman uses to cut into his plastic cars. Oatman's collages are up through tomorrow in a group show at the Miller Block Gallery.
Some of the model makers identify themselves as artists, some call themselves modelers or hobbyists, others resist classification. Each of them is fanatical about detail, from tiny bucket seats to the dried grass along a rail line. And they all lose themselves in worlds of their own making.
''What motivates me is not whether it is art or not, or whether it is good or not, but that people are so devoted to it and spend so much of their lives perfecting it," says Oatman.
Freeman considers himself an artist, but the plastic cars are not his art. He paints and draws. He's a ''kit basher," someone who uses a modeling kit for ends not intended by the company that produced it. He works on his autos as part of a process that leads to drawing and painting abstract works.
Freeman, a quizzical, talkative fellow who makes a living driving trolley tours, has been playing with models since he was a kid.
''When I was 13, I got a model of a 1961 Comet, which was the car my parents owned," says Freeman, 58. ''I chopped the top off and used wood putty there. I went through two or three of these things. It was always a botched effort, but I never lost interest."
Katrina Killar, 26, makes sculptural dioramas with tiny dolls in glass boxes, lit from within. She's been building them for eight years, since she was a freshman at Massachusetts College of Art. ''I'm interested in dramatically lit situations and scenes," Killar says over the phone. ''They're otherworldly, like repressed childhood dreams. I think they're about different situations in my life, the way my emotions come out."
''Modeling is getting hot right now in the art world," says Oatman. ''The artists I'm meeting are not making models for the same reason as the others. It's biographical, maybe about incidents they can't talk about directly but want to speak about emotionally."
Daniel Fokine, 24, doesn't consider himself an artist; his interest in miniatures sprang from making military models as a kid to play war games. After a while, the kits weren't refined enough, and Fokine started to craft his own 25-millimeter soldiers and military equipment out of epoxy. Lately, he's been making architectural outcrops from balsa wood.
''The new project is testing the waters of high art," Fokine says over the phone.
Why does he do it?
''It's the perfection," he says. ''I become better. More conceptual. More skilled."
''Sometimes model making seems a little bit godlike," says Oatman, whose collaged worlds have their own kind of perfection -- although he points out that his process is often more improvisatory than that of most model makers.
''Unlike the real world, where things mess up all the time, at that [small] scale it's about a kind of control that's awesome," Oatman concludes. ''Control, escapism, and privacy. It's a potent mix."
© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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