“Held within what hung open and made to lie without escape,” an installation by Gregory Euclide, consisting of several dioramas made from materials collected from walks, paper casts of boulders from Central Park and a 7 ft by 5 ft landscape painting in a gilded frame. From the exhibit, Otherworldly: optical delusions and small realities- Museum of Arts and Design, New York, N.Y 2011.
What fascinated me about this installation using both traditional and found materials was the artist’s way of depicting the two-dimensional world spilling out into the three-dimensional space. Growing up in New York City, I spent many hours as a child in the Museum of Natural History wandering between the dinosaurs and wondering if the stuffed tigers in the life-size dioramas were suddenly going to leap out and grab me. I was most curious about finding the actual physical line where the two dimensional painting stopped and the three-dimensional taxidermy animals and plants began – that slippery point where the real world and the world of the imagination seamlessly collide.
