Kysa Johnson: Income Inequality and Scale Models

Project Diary. Scales and Math

I totally got it all figured out!

I am going to drape the walls with vinyl. Paint them with blackboard paint and cover them with a sprawling, scrawling East Hampton landscape made up of tiny subatomic decay patterns (change, time passing, the transformation of states and situations).

In the center will sit the frames of two very different houses, one nested inside the other: Ira Rennert’s palatial East Hampton estate (the largest in the US,) and the little clapboard East Hampton farmhouse which inspired the traditional American song Home Sweet Home. The difference in scale between the two will be the difference in income inequality between then and now, 333%.

These house frames in turn will be painted black (of course!) and drawn on so that they fade back into the surrounding landscape, tiny blips in the history of the land and the earth.

So…. done!

Oh wait, no, I just worked out the math. The proportions would be insane. Ira Rennert’s estate is so f-ing big that it’s impossible to do any kind of replica of it that would fit in the gallery without its height being like 2 inches. Then if I take into the account the real scale difference between the houses (approximately 1,000%) plus the 333% difference in income inequality, the Home Sweet Home house would be like a tiny grain of sand. And then how will you really know what you are seeing scale wise? The 333% gets lost in the 1,000%. Oh, the irony!

Damned math!

Arghhh, it’s such a lovely, clean idea on paper and in my head! Damned math!

Alright, fine. So, what if I move the specific houses into the wall drawing? You have a timeline of inflating houses.  Then the central house frames become just houses, the Plantonic ideal of a house. Still one nested inside the other and with the scale difference corresponding to the difference in income inequality, but now because you are comparing apples to apples instead of apples to super-yachts the difference can be digested.

Maybe the outside one is falling into itself? Super obvious? That can wait. First step is to start the wall drawing.

This article © Kysa Johnson and galleryIntell