In the age of the flat screen, a show about the diorama sounds charmingly naïve. The word itself conjures benign images of hobbyists with tweezers and sixth graders with shoeboxes.
Yet Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities, at the Museum of Arts and Design, circles back to the two-dimensional image in ways that feel very sophisticated. A good number of the show’s more than 40 artists build model homes, cities and landscapes mainly to photograph them.
The connection to photography, it turns out, isn’t new. In his catalog essay, Seeing and Knowing, David Revere McFadden, the museum’s chief curator and this show’s organizer, traces today’s model worlds back to the 19th-century dioramas created as mass entertainment by the photographic pioneer Louis Daguerre. Their stage-lighted scrims offered audiences immersive, Imax-like tours of Gothic cathedrals (also a popular subject of early photographs).
