Curated by Louise Barry, Featuring: Andrea Moreau, Andrew Scott Ross, Ivan Gaete, Audrey Hasen Russell, James Reeder, Lucas Monaco, Max Liboiron, Nancy Radloff, and Tina Schneider.

Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels brought his 18th century audience into worlds of radically different scale. The Liliputians and Brobdignagians unsettled their understandably common view that our human scale is the only one that counts, and revealed the underlying political powers involved in relationships of scale. Louise Barry’s subtle and carefully crafted exhibition invites us to experience the vertigo of this kind of Swiftian voyage, but it also does more than this: Barry’s target is the tension between power and intimacy.

Being bigger means being more powerful, but also means losing access to certain spaces requiring a more delicate touch. Being smaller means being less noticeable, but also means a very different kind of power is created when noticed. The work in the show explores the way scale on both physical and psychological levels creates and distorts the possibility of “magical” encounters by, in Barry’s words, “communicating a sense of the large within the small, that simultaneously references the here and now and the immense unknown outside our immediate experience.” Responding to a world in which bigger is brasher, where reality itself seems equated with the grand and gargantuan, Barry offers us unreality, imagination, and perhaps a tiny path to a more intimate engagement with the world around us.

HUMAN SCALE is a NURTUREart Emerging Curators’ Program Collaboration. Learn more about all of NURTUREart’s programs and opportunities for emerging artists and curators at www.nurtureart.org.