Krista Peel’s had half a dozen or so shows of her paintings and drawings over the years. Some of her work is quite large–one ongoing project involves creating site-specific paintings for people’s homes. But her latest project is very, very small. “I’ve been living mostly in apartments, so I haven’t had room to work on anything huge,” she says. “I started working with miniatures because of the size factor, but it’s also really fun to work in that scale–you can be really expansive.”
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In 2002 Peel, who’d graduated from the School of the Art Institute six years earlier, was casting around for a collaborative project–something that would “include other people’s work to help promote them and also to share the joy of a show.” What she came up with manages to fuse her love of miniatures and her fondness for shelter porn like Trading Spaces–shows that “when I watch them, I’m excited for people to be changing their outlook on the spaces that they live in.”
She completed about two rooms a month, photographing each as it was finished, then stripping the decor–including taking up the floor and repainting the walls. The chairs even got reupholstered each time; the only constants were the blue couch and the plant. As the project grew, she says, people started to pitch in. “I wasn’t working on my master’s thesis or anything,” she says. “I was working on a dollhouse, and it was easy for people to get excited about it….I’d go to their house and people would be like, ‘Oh, I have something for you!’ and bring out these handfuls of the weirdest little objects.” The top of a perfume bottle became a vase; a saltshaker from Trader Vic’s became a totem in the tiki-themed room. Then she made the photographs into a calendar. “The format of the calendar was good because it gave me structure,” she says. “I had to do 12 rooms, but it’s the same room. I just redecorate it 12 times.”
