Housing inequality, in miniature: artist Karine Giboulo’s Gardiner Museum exhibit reflects on daily lives

In 18th-century Britain, miniature houses were considered an upper-class luxury. Ornately carved curios, these “baby houses” were not designed for play but as a teaching tool for domestic servants. Wealthy Europeans would commission small versions of their homes to show off priceless collectibles.

There is a fascinating history of miniature-making to unravel — from postwar children’s dollhouses to the nightmare-inducing tableaux in the 2018 horror film “Hereditary” — before we arrive at the doorstep of Montreal sculptor Karine Giboulo’s wonderful new exhibition, “Housewarming,” now on at the Gardiner Museum. Where those early replicas lorded economic status, Giboulo’s thought-provoking dioramic home, inhabited by more than 500 Lilliputian polymer-clay figures, welcomes us in to reflect on those whose daily lives are rarely captured in art.

“Housewarming” feels familiar yet bizarre, humorous but heartbreaking, as if our collective experiences through COVID-19 were parsed through a Wonderland filter. Giboulo likens the space to a personal diary and a commentary on life through the pandemic. I hesitate in giving away too many details — the real magic of this show is physically moving through the space and peeking into every corner.

On the top floor of the Gardiner, Giboulo and her team, including curator Karine Tsoumis, have reimagined a full-scale version of her home, blurring fiction and fact. At first glance, life seems normal, but this cozy pad is inhabited by hundreds of tiny people focused on their own daily routines. Nothing is exactly what it seems: a worn kitchen dishcloth is actually sculpted of clay, as is a well-used Minions toothbrush in the bathroom. (For a laugh, check out the Zoom face on the office worker perched inside the bird cage.)

Outside the front door, I spot a familiar sight: a cardboard Amazon box sitting on the porch. Two eye holes are cut out, creating a malevolent grin out of the swooping logo. Crouching down to peer inside the box outfitted with mirror trickery, I find a warehouse filled with endless rows of masked workers, packaging an infinite number of tiny boxes. It’s an unsettling reminder that the luxury of delivery comes at a human cost.

“A big theme throughout the house is about the other side of our domestic comfort, where some people are basically working for us to be able to stay home,” said Tsoumis.

During the pandemic, Giboulo traded in her studio for a spot at the kitchen table, working from home, a lifestyle she’s since continued, planning much of this show through Zoom calls. “It’s so comfortable,” she said. “I feel like I am creating in a bubble.”

Walk through the kitchen and you’ll spot a wee Giboulo ensconced inside a coffee pot, feet adorned in bulky plaid slippers, carving an even smaller version of the polymer bananas that sit on the kitchen table as they’re chemically sanitized by a tiny person in a hazmat suit. It’s this coziness and play with scale that becomes unsettling as you move through the kitchen.

On the counter, a line of wee people wait patiently at a food bank housed in a recyclable grocery bag. A Dutch oven becomes a makeshift home for a group of refugees preparing a simple collective meal. In the pantry, shelves of canning jars represent long-term care workers and residents isolated from each other and the outside world. While canning-jar crafts and cooking are ubiquitous on Pinterest, here they are used as grieving vessels, imprisoning hunched bodies.

“It’s a component that preserves food,” said Giboulo about using the jars as human containers. She ensures each tiny person has unique characteristics, from their faces to their posture and clothing. “Sometimes I think we try to preserve life, but without addressing the emotional needs.”

Giboulo, who also works in documentary, has been creating these representative clay models for more than 25 years. She originally focused on large paintings that played with human scale but, in an experiment, discovered that she preferred the materiality of clay. It’s also a form that allows her to shrink down some of the heavy topics her work considers in a way that doesn’t overwhelm.

What hasn’t changed is how her social consciousness drives artistic creation, and how Giboulo uses her figures to reflect on troubling world crises.

In 2012, she created “Democracy Village,” a Haitian shantytown based on her own visits to Port-au-Prince. In “Housewarming,” her first fully immersive show, a dresser drawer of garment workers at industrial sewing machines is modelled after her visit to China about 20 years ago, when she posed as a business person to gain access to factory floors. Atop the dresser is a tiny model of her grandmother, knitting away for her family as an act of love.

Giboulo notes how easy it is to shut the drawer and to ignore the human costs of fast fashion.

“Clothing is supposed to to take care of people,” she said, pointing out the juxtaposition. “But who is taking care of these people?”

Just a few months before the pandemic, Giboulo was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, an inflammatory condition that mostly affects the spine and bones, sometimes referred to as the “dinosaur disease.” In the bedroom, we see tiny Giboulo not as an artist but as a fallible human, reflected in the mirror with a grey shadow, her body morphing into a prehistoric creature. “I was already feeling more confined in my body,” she said.

The pretty sheets on the bed with their three-dimensional floral pattern suggest hope, as tiny clay Giboulo and her husband, ensconced in the middle, enjoy a peaceful rest.

It’s in this quiet moment, in the most intimate room in the house, that the hopeful message and the power of Giboulo’s art really hit home as she reveals, “I decided to give myself a good night’s sleep.”

Karine Giboulo: Housewarming, runs at the Gardiner Museum, 111 Queen’s Park until May 7, 2023. See gardinermuseum.on.ca for more information.

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