Adia Millett
bio • images • profile • artist statement • overview • resources

Artist Statement

Using craft materials, installation, and photography, I investigate our innate desire to define objects, people, and ideas that are, in fact, not present. Built on a scale of one inch-to-one foot, each miniature dollhouse functions as an imaginary home-a home that contains myriad objects, but no visible inhabitants. The small dwellings, and the varied objects they contain, insinuate a large range of potential narratives into an otherwise straightforward voyeurism. Viewers must rely on their own memories, stories, and lives, and therefore upon their perceptions of class and culture, to create new stories existing as both truth and fiction.

For me, the often playful, yet deceptive narratives derive from the limitations of access permitted to the viewer, and to myself as the maker. The viewer on one level is permitted to peer into the windows, yet is unable to touch objects that are intended for physical play. This, combined with the muddled object placements and missing human figures, suggests not a parallel, but a consistency within divisions of class, which prevents groups from participating in the process of miniature-building.

As an artist and maker delving into a sub-culture historically based on leisure and financial excess, I attempt to illuminate subtle limitations and more overt exclusions. The dollhouses, or environments, not only are present, but they explicate their own reason for being: the search or pursuit of inexpensive miniature materials, especially in a community whose objects are based on so-called ideals, dreams, and fantasies, inevitably leads to a field of culturally exclusive pastimes.