I found myself focusing on why. When Off was a child, his mother contracted polio and was sent away; his father often left to visit her. Left by himself an enormous amount, Off began casting and painting lead soldiers. He looked now at these miniatures—Homer’s solitary studio, the room where Eleanor endured sixteen years of solitude. “For some reason, my boxes tend to be about lonely people,” he told me.
“The beauty of miniatures is that I can live in any house I want to live in.”
On her table at Miniaturia, she displayed a series of bulletin boards covered with yarn and pictures. “I did the conspiracy theorist shed,” she said. “Kind of a commentary on the QAnon and anti-vax deniers. When things were really bad, it was a cool way to control that.” Surrounded by conspiracy theorists putting her culture and her planet at risk, she squeezed all that madness into a 1:144 little box; there, she was in charge. “That scene, you set the climate for your own stuff,” she told me.
