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Reality has different rules when you play with scale, shows an exhibition curated by a Harvard physicist

Measure for Measure Gallery 825, Los Angeles, curated by Lisa Randall

REALITY plays by different rules at different scales. At incredibly short distances, particles can seem to be in two places at once. Over extremely small timescales, matter can spontaneously appear out of nothing. And over vast distances, the furtive force of dark energy overrules gravity.

Scale matters in art too. By playing with scale, artists make the ordinary extraordinary and force us to rethink our everyday world. For instance, Jeff Koons鈥檚 Balloon Dog, a sculpture that looks like a balloon animal but stands over 10 feet tall, makes a monument of a toy, dwarfing the viewer by comparison.

The street installation sculptures of people by London-based artist Slinkachu, which are perhaps an inch tall, undermine, as writer Will Self puts it, 鈥渢he asinine pride that derives from our environment and ourselves being to scale with each other鈥�.

So when Peter Mays, director of the Los Angeles Art Association, asked Harvard physicist Lisa Randall to curate an art exhibit in collaboration with artist Lia Halloran, Randall knew that scale would be the perfect theme. 鈥淚 wanted a theme where both art and science could participate and it wasn鈥檛 just art representing science or science pretending to be art, but where we could think deeply about ideas that underlie both of them,鈥� Randall explains.

Randall worked closely with seven up-and-coming artists to create Measure for Measure, a show featuring painting, sculpture, video and installation pieces. Many of the pieces employ mirrors, shadows and projections to showcase the interplay of the small and the large and to create worlds within worlds.

Katrina McElroy鈥檚 Migratory Flow (above) is comprised of circles flocking across a wall like self-organising particles. Look closer and you find that within each circle is a close-up still of a person. In Structures, Meeson Pae Yang engraved plexiglass with patterns derived from the complex structures of diatoms 鈥� tiny single-celled phytoplankton. 鈥淎lthough diatoms are small, their influence is magnified by the life cycle and food chain of our environment,鈥� the artist says. The engraved pieces refract and reflect light, casting geometric projections of varying sizes throughout the gallery.

Susan Sironi created Actual Size 鈥� A portrait in four parts by taking illustrated classics like Gulliver鈥檚 Travels and Through the Looking Glass, then carving to-scale tracings of her body parts into them. The juxtaposition of the true-to-size human anatomy with stories that encapsulate entire worlds, and themselves play with scale, is clever and quite beautiful.

I asked Mays whether the artists gained an appreciation for physics. 鈥淥h god, yes!鈥� he said. 鈥淚鈥檝e seen them carrying books around about different scientific theories.鈥�