In Sonoma County art circles, going small may be the next big thing. Or at least it is for Bill Shelley and Chris Beards, the artists behind Blasted Art Gallery, who have resurrected their former Santa Rosa gallery in a new form: a portable, miniature exhibition space measuring just 16 inches high, 33 inches wide and 21 inches deep.
Its name, naturally, is FUN SIZE Blasted Art Gallery. Its first exhibition is called SCREAM. Actually, every artwork in it is called SCREAM. Twelve artists, one title, one tiny gallery and, according to the organizers, one collective response to “the avalanche of global, national, local and personal issues that confront us every day.”
That is a lot to fit into a box. Then again, that may be the point.
Blasted Art Gallery originally operated from 2017 to 2019 in Santa Rosa’s SOFA Arts District, where it presented exhibitions featuring Sonoma County artists before shifting online in 2020. With FUN SIZE, Shelley and Beards have not so much reopened the gallery as shrunk, reimagined and mobilized it. The result is less dollhouse novelty than conceptual art delivery system—a gallery that can travel in a car, appear in different cities and still contain a complete exhibition.
Shelley says scale itself was one of the sparks.
“One motivation was anytime you change the scale of a piece of art, it can change the whole meaning of it,” he notes.
The idea was not simply to ask artists to make small work. It was to ask them to think in miniature. The exhibition works at a 1-to-12 scale, with pieces under seven inches tall, creating a proportional world in which a five- or six-inch figure would stand in for a full-size gallerygoer. That framework forced participating artists to reckon with space, material and impact differently than they might on a normal gallery wall.
“We wanted to play with, with the idea of scale and also, present that challenge to local artists who may normally work at a medium to large size,” Shelley says, “to see what would happen if they worked very small.”
That answer, judging by the premise, is that the work gets louder. SCREAM is about compression: shrinking the object while enlarging the feeling. In a moment when morally horrifying news arrives hourly, the title is increasingly apt. Edvard Munch would agree.
The show’s official statement calls the gallery “a portable vessel for this chorus of 12 artists’ voices,” and that chorus includes Arminée Chahbazian, Art Moura, Bill Shelley, Britta Kathmeyer, Carlos Perez, Chris Beards, Jennifer Mygatt Tatum, Kathleen Youngquist, Keviette Minor, Kristen Throop, Nick Mancillas and Nicole Mathers.
“We wanted to have a diversity of voices coming together for this community scream,” Shelley points out.
The show will make three Sonoma County stops, covering north, central and south county. The grand opening is 5-7pm, Thursday, July 2, Rena Charles Gallery, 439 Healdsburg Ave., Healdsburg. It continues 5-8pm, Friday, July 3, Santa Rosa Arts Center, SOFA Arts District, 312 South A St., and 4-6pm, Saturday, July 11, Studio LZ Gallery, 429 1st St., Suite 130, Petaluma.
Artworks will be available for purchase, with prices ranging from $150 into the thousands. After that, FUN SIZE may keep traveling. Shelley and Beards are open to additional venues, perhaps proving that the smallest gallery in Sonoma County may have the longest legs.
In the end, the work may be miniature, but the emotional scale is full-size.
More information at instagram.com/blastedartgallery.
