Model Home: A Study Under Compression
Introduction
What makes small things so desirable?
A diminutive world is at once charming abut unsettling. While it may be empowering, the ability to hold a miniature realm in the palm of one’s hand, inflating size, it is the derangement of scale that suggests a sense of omnipotence. One might suggest it’s a “way to play God” or “master the puppet,” and that the “hands above” are orchestrating the interactions below. Another observer may claim a brittle, lonely existence, of both the miniaturist and the vignette. What comes to mind might be that of clinical sterility, creating a scene that would never be viable outside its carefully curated borders.
This medium allows a distillation of human experience into a single — often fraught — emotion or moment; it allows a suspension of time and offers a glimpse of intimacy, transformational moments, or quiet calamities.
Working in miniature is oddly satisfying and exploratory, delving into unconscious realms, revealing greater truth — and perhaps — art.
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Family Unit / Triad / New Surroundings
A model home speaks to fragility, compression, and perhaps: fear. As the family makes their way to their new home, bare, with potential, they are giddy, if not a bit reticent. It’s about culture and status. Appearance. Can they maintain it?
Father says, “I’ll clear the walk.” He clears the walk.
Errant weeds claw at the cracks.
Mother says, “I’ll decorate.” She culls through catalogues and paint chips.
The paint chips.
Daughter says, “I’ll keep it together.”
Which means: she is the glue.
The family, the house.
Hangs in precarious balance.
Intro to Home Economics: A Designer Home
Mother installs a blue backsplash, a microwave oven.
Father brings home the paycheck, but it’s never enough for all the things: the custom sofa, the cable TV, the piano and rugs.
She gets more: A VCR, an ‘entertainment system,’ a new baby, too.
The walls are papered and stripped and papered again.
And is that other man the reflection of one, another, or the secrets of yet more?
The daughter knows, but she won’t dare say.
Design Flaw
She woke and the house yawned—spit her out.
While trying to repair a fractured life, the phantoms could no longer be contained;
the subterranean monsters of the past infiltrated.
Her world blurred, like floating in some astral anteroom.
Bombardment of Stones
Father knew the cliches: those who live in glass homes shouldn’t throw stones, a rolling stone gathers no moss.
But it was true: he had the weight of the world on his shoulders.
The walls, meant to truss, fell away, leaving him at Wit’s End.
Mother is admitted to the psychiatric hospital. Chemical imbalances, drug-induced psychoses, personality disorders, unresolved childhood stress.
The roof was pummeled with diagnoses, an alphabet soup: PTSD, BPD, SI/HI.
She returned to the abode, once inhabited. By another version. Of herself. She can’t bear to look.
The daughter is raised, on her glass pedestal, fragile and perilous, succumbing to her mother’s fate, her deepest fear.
The younger child — cleaved from her mother — spilling from her container, a fractured cry.
Is the Nuclear Family Worth Saving?
The rope: an umbilical cord, purse strings, the fact that they family is knotted together in anxiety.
The stoppers on the glass speak to keeping things ‘bottled up,’ but also compression — and what might happen when all is let loose.
Mother in a tube illustrates not only her fragility but her isolation, how maybe the rest of the family need her a more sterile container.
The girl at the door is the protector. She feels a sense of duty and responsibility to “keeping things together,” even though she is only a child.
Her squared-off, distant gaze is a form of self-preservation; she isn’t exactly sure why she isn’t loved and accepted by her mother, but she is also aware that she cannot change her, that her mother’s behavior really has nothing to do with her.
Father has been disillusioned for so long, but now, the veil has been lifted. He’s always been the protector, but inside, he’s fragmented, the debris floating to the surface.
Tiny Reparations
Everything hangs in precarious balance, an overturning.
There’s a sense of being trapped, encased, frozen in the underbelly of the house.
And the mother, she is the house. Even as they attempt to repair a fractured life, the foundation of what was once known will never be restored.
Someone — the father, the daughter, the mother — thinks they can rise from the floor, elevate the story, but in reality: the downfall is apparent.
Under A Microscope
Mother returns once more — obscured, faceless — to constellate her belongings.
She shuffles through the drawers of sealed secrets and disappointments, unmothered ghosts of the past. If she can surrender the storylines of her past, let go of failures, then she might be able to return to playing house.
Yet the entrance is clouded, obfuscated. Was it even there in the first place?
Being a specter to the house isn’t working: it’s too transparent, too deceptive.
Square Feet
The mother believes the family fortunes are encased in fear, bitterness, and hostility.
The daughter knows differently. She begins to unearth the strange creatures at the base of her family tree.
She gathers items: (1) pencils (2) paper (3) templates [of circles] (4) vials and (5) stoppers.
These materials are not coincidental but an illusion of choice.
If she can contain [vial], [stopper], her mother’s mercurial moods, she can save them all. If she can construct a stable home [pencils], [paper], [templates], and reinforce the walls as the sun spills over the rafters, she can break the cycle [180-degrees, 360-degrees].
The Geometry is skewed, she realizes, but in the end, it’s what saves her.
Wandering in an Afterlife
A house is always vulnerable, she decides.
Nature takes back: the echoes of voices in a dead house, a distorted requiem.
What was once a self-contained universe, both a mirror and a window, is now a battleground, a family divided.
Here is what the daughter believes: all we can ever own is our mind and imaginations; those are the only things we can understand as “real.”
All An Illusion: Before/After/After/Before
Living the (parenthetical) suburban domesticity. Before the house went silent.
(dis) solution
(dis) tort
(in) habit
(un) ravel
(ex) halations
(in) halations
