Courtesy of Theo Andres
This semester, students from the Human Development and Psychology courses (HMD 225, FYS 1069, and PSY206) taught by Assistant Professor of Psychoanalytic Anthropology Salma Siddique used their midterm projects to construct an exhibit of shoe-box dioramas that explore each student’s childhood, life, and influences.
The exhibit is available to view in the auditorium of the Lyman Allyn Art Museum– which provides free admission for Conn students. With some mounted to the wall, and some on an expansive table, the extensive display of dioramas explored a huge variety of personal and developmental influences, from the most specific and family-based to the governmental and international. Some common themes included abortion rights, Christian and other religious homophobia, eating disorders and body dysmorphia, divorce and parent conflict, and displacement and immigration. Other students chose to portray influences and memories like relationships with specific family members, athletics and being active, and exploring the outdoors as children.
Some students chose to use the inside of the shoe box to portray a specific room or evoke a certain location such as a classroom, a church, a bathroom, or even a backyard, while others crafted the inside to evoke certain emotions or sensations more abstractly. In a paper by Professor Siddique and Natalia Varfi exploring the intricacies of diorama-creating, called “Between Us: The Politics of What We Do Not Keep Boxed-up,” the shoe-box dioramas become a ‘second skin’ for students, or “protective spaces where identity can safely unfold.” Shoe-boxes are used as the method of creating the dioramas not only because of what shoes do to physically protect our bodies, but also because of how our shoes, commonplace as they are, define our identities and social standings. The paper describes the ways that containment “from mason jars to racial checkboxes,” or to dioramas, can illuminate our own relationships with our pasts, presents, and futures.
In creating the exhibit, the dioramas attempt to shift our ideas of museum containment, reconceptualizing the galleries as “spaces for psychological holding.” As Professor Siddique uses in the exhibit description, Tolstoy’s words evoke the sentiment of the diorama wall: “If it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.” Tolstoy (2000: Anna Karenina p142).
