Slinkachu miniature people

Gulliver’s Travels for the modern day: miniature people with ordinary that are installed at an incredibly small scale, urban art that blend into the background of everyday debris on sidewalks and streets. Seen up close, these tell stories of their microcosmic world that range from heartwarming to harrowing – not your typical gallery arts.

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The Little People project by Slinkachu has grown a significant following over the years with periodic blog updates, gallery shows and even a book of miniature adventures. Sometimes they are slain by forces of the larger world and at other times these tiny individuals take advantage of their surroundings.

Tiny art installations

Most of the photographs of these small-scale scenes come in pairs – a close-up shot that almost seems ordinary, a scene from everyday life, followed by a more panoramic wide-angle view of the grotesquely larger world that surrounds them and, in many cases, the unknown dangers they are in.

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While many of these stagings are quite simple and rely on existing conditions, minimal (if any) props and a few small painted figures a few are more elaborate and correspondingly strangely more engaging. Like a shuttle from outer space, this hybrid fast food box (for example) has apparently bedazzled the little person that encountered it who is shown frozen in time making his way toward the light.

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“I started working with miniatures in 2006. My work involves remodelling and painting of miniature model train set characters, which I then place and leave on the street. It is both sculpture, street art installation and photography. The street-based side of my work plays with the notion of surprise and I aim to encourage city-dwellers to be more aware of their surroundings.”

“The scenes I set up, more evident through the photography and the titles I give these scenes, aim to reflect the loneliness and melancholy of living in a big city; the universal sense of being overlooked, lost and overwhelmed. But along side this there is always some humour in my works. The modern world can be a preposterous place to live and I encourage empathy with the tiny people struggling to get by.”