The Village and His Bedroom

In the early 1990's my mother sent me several boxes of my childhood toys and train sets that my parents had carefully saved. The first project that emerged was The Village, a series of 21 photographs of Plasticville, a commercially produced set of scale buildings I assembled and customized for the table top landscape of my trains that featured dioramas I constructed with miniature people, cars, trees, shrubs, grass, sidewalks, streets and farmland. Decades later, after much experimentation, I photographed Plasticville and its other related objects in a minimal background with lighting that that created a simple, illusionary landscape open to imagination.  A selection of The Village prints were first exhibited at Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco in 1994 and Simon Lowinsky Gallery, New York in 1995.

Projected images of The Village photographs also became a central element of a slide projection-audio-sculptural installation I designed entitled His Bedroom. In a proposal I first sent to Andy Grundberg, then the director of The Ansel Adams Center and Jonathan Green at the UCR California Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside, I wrote:

"In the exhibition area sits a wooden bed covered with white sheets and a cement pillow. Adjacent to the bed is a table with an illuminated globe. Slides of the artifacts of my childhood and toy village are projected on the wall and slowly dissolve into one another while slides of early drawings, sections of report cards and phrases from autograph books signed by my classmates appear on the bed. Audio of children playing while a model train circles around the room."

His Bedroom was based on the pre-photographic concept of a camera obscura, a darkened room with a small hole in one wall that functioned as a pinhole lens projecting an image of the exterior world on to an interior wall. Another foundational component of His Bedroom is the role of dreaming in the world building and socialization of a child's mind. In 1994 His Bedroom premiered at The Ansel Adams Center in San Francisco and was a part of my first solo museum exhibition  at UCR California Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside.

I also showed the His Bedroom proposal notebook to Andrew Perchuk, curator at the Alternative Museum in New York who was working with curator Helaine Posner on a project exploring masculinity.  They included His Bedroom in the landmark exhibition and publication “The Masculine Masquerade” at the MIT List Visual Art Center, Cambridge Massachusetts in 1995..

Later that year Charles Stainback, showed His Bedroom at the International Center of Photography,  New York,  and in 1996 curator Andrea Inselmann included His Bedroom in the exhibition "Masculine Measures" at The John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Finally from 1996-1999 I constructed an additional copy of His Bedroom that was included in "Embedded Metaphor" an exhibition curated by Nina Felshin that traveled to six venues organized and circulated by Independent Curators Incorporated Incorporated, New York, NY.