By Michael O'Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 5, 2006

Size matters.

This is not the intended message of "Micro-Monumental," an exhibition of miniature sculptures at the Gallery at Flashpoint, but it's the one you're likely to come away with. Juried by Kristen Hileman, assistant curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, from submissions by members of the Washington Sculptors Group, Sculptors Inc. of Baltimore, Philadelphia Sculptors and the New England Sculptors Association, the show invites you to consider that small works can have as commanding a presence as large ones.

In only some cases is this true.

Take, for instance, Megan Van Wagoner's "Personal Wealth." The unimposing lump of aluminum -- cast from a teabag, if my eyes don't deceive me -- is about as far from Claes Oldenburg and his oversize household objects as possible. Yet something about its baseness draws our attention and, more important, holds our focus, precisely because it doesn't demand it. Its stillness is its virtue, and its humility its greatest strength.

Note that I used the word "miniature" above. In some cases (particularly when "Micro-Monumental" doesn't work so well), it would be more apt to say the works are miniaturized . They feel not just compressed but compromised, as though they had been shrunken down by a machine out of "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids."

This is especially obvious in the contributions of certain artists whose typically much larger work will be familiar to local audiences. Such pieces as Margaret Boozer's clay-based "Micro Landscape" or Alan Binstock's glasswork "A Leg Up for Jacob" feel like maquettes, or studies, for larger works in the material and scale with which we're most familiar. Looking at them and others, it's hard to resist the temptation to imagine them, well, life-size. They feel like practice more than finished product.

When "Micro-Monumental" works -- and it's often enough to make a visit worthwhile -- it's when the art's size is intrinsic to its subject, material or both. It's when the dimensions feel necessary, rather than a gimmick by artists who normally work on a grander scale. Examples include David Meyer's "Natural Selection #6," featuring dandelion seeds embedded in an acrylic pedestal; Steven Davy's chromed-plastic trophy "Order"; and Joyce Audy Zarins's "Wheat, the American Staple," in which a painted-plaster tower of trompe l'oeil crackers simultaneously mock and pay homage to ideas of national pride.

Similarly, the scale of the found object at the heart of Patrick Burke's "Mold Lock Wedge" (seemingly, a small mold for manufacturing some kind of clamp) is not just appropriate but necessary. Without doing anything much, the stack of cast-wax forms accompanying it calls attention to the formal, and purely accidental, beauty of industrial products.

Across the river, Alexandria's Target Gallery plays with a similar theme, but with less overall success, in "Not to Scale."

Juried by the Corcoran Gallery of Art's former director, David Levy, "Scale" isn't exclusively about smallness so much as it is about size in general. Standouts in this mixed bag of a group show, which ranges from a straight-ahead, and rather uninspired, eight-inch-square painting to more conceptual work, include Lin White's "The Reduction -- Real and Imagined."

In a series of mixed-media, before-and-after-style figure sketches, the artist documents her 30-plus-pound weight loss, complete with measurements, overlaid like an architect's blueprint, onto the image's surface. In a wry commentary of our obsession with body image, the final picture contains an extrapolation of what White would look like if she were to have continued to lose not just weight, but dimensions. The impossibly distorted torso is like something seen in a funhouse mirror, but without the fun.

In "Games" and "Council," Roger Bisbing uses miniature folding chairs and tables to create facsimiles of a game room and a meeting hall, respectively. His approach is more deadpan than White's -- one wonders what, exactly, is the point of shrinking these unpeopled spaces down to dollhouse size -- but the works have an eerie power that belies their cutesiness.

Finally, there's Andrew Miller's "Untitled Atlanta GA." The photograph of a giant CNN logo dwarfing a person sitting outside the company's offices makes an effective point about Big Media and the insignificance of the individual. Oddly enough, though, I found myself quibbling with one aspect of the piece. It wasn't the composition of the picture that rankled, or its content, but the size of the print.

It's too small to be taken seriously.

MICRO-MONUMENTAL Through May 27 at the Gallery at Flashpoint, 916 G St. NW (Metro: Gallery Place-Chinatown). 202-315-1310. http://www.flashpointdc.org/venues/art_gallery.html. Open daily noon to 6. Free.

NOT TO SCALE Through May 28 at the Target Gallery, Torpedo Factory Art Center, 105 N. Union St. Alexandria. 703-838-4565. http://www.torpedofactory.org/galleries/target.htm. Open Wednesday-Sunday noon to 5; open late the second Thursday of the month. Free.