Roland Reiss
United States
b. 1929

The Dancing Lesson: Keeping Time, 1977
Mixed Media miniature tableau
13.5 x 24 x 24 in.
Sweeney Art Gallery Permanent Collection
Gift of Cynthia S. Monaco
97.3.2

Keeping Time is one of 30 unique mixed-media miniature tableaus from the series called The Dancing Lesson. Reiss' miniature installations operate through the exaggeration of scale, similar to doll houses, but without their nostalgic appeal. Reiss is particularly interested in how we relate to small things, how we begin to project ourselves into the piece. All of Reiss' miniature and life-size tableaus put the viewer in the center of the issues addressed. We become the subject; we project ourselves into his tableaus, mentally playing the figure in the narrative. In its displacement of conventional size, his tableaus offer us a range of vantage points from which to reconsider the proportions of our own lives.


Detail from The Dancing Lesson

..."Keeping Time is about the dance of art history. The student's chair is surrounded by art history books and notes. If you're seated in that chair and you look out through the columns, you see the entire history of art including steel beam sculpture, feminist art, video art, etc. I have an obscenity written on the slide screen in Classical Greek. I like that because even art historians can't decipher it! I believe that on one level or another, history remains a mystery to all of us." -Roland Reiss

© UC Regents and the artist.