Everyone loves miniatures; all those model railroad sets the world over. We love to hover over them like invisible giants peering nostalgically down at the little trees and the quaint old buildings; a tiny perfect little subset of the world untroubled by war, poverty, addiction and disease. Which is why Peter Feigenbaum's miniatures qualify as art. They smack that smug giant upside the gob and say, this is your world. If you can't take the bad with the good then you're not facing reality. His miniature slums are exquisitely detailed down to the graffiti, the wreckage of old burned out cars, the trash, and the weeds growing up through the cracking sidewalks. A lot of artists these days are obsessed with visions of the imminent collapse of our so-called civilization. But these scale models remind us that great swaths of that civilization have been living in their own apocalyptic nightmares the whole time.
I also like how he often places the models in the context or actual degraded neighborhoods and photographs them in a way so that they seem to integrate perfectly with the real world. A nice way to remind us how rarely we stop and actually look around, especially when we sense that what we'll see is not so nice.
You can see many more photos on his website at www.peterfeigenbaum.com
And congratulations to Mr. Feigenbaum on being included in this year's West Collection.
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