Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities

OTHERWORLDY: Optical Delusions and Small Realities illuminates the phenomenal renaissance of interest among artists worldwide in constructing small-scale, hand-built depictions of artificial environments and alternative realities, either as sculpture or as subjects for photography and video.

The book features contemporary work by approximately 35 preeminent visual artists who have generated renewed interest in this art form: a diverse group of international practitioners, ranging from sculptors and painters to photographers and videographers. This fully illustrated catalogue will also feature artist biographies and artist statements, and include a curatorial essay by exhibition curator David Revere McFadden that traces the history of dioramas and visual illusions in the history of the visual arts to Louis Daguerre’s innovative dioramas of the early 1800s and provides an interpretive overview of work by all of the featured artists.