Imagine a microwave. Now imagine an art gallery about that size, filled with an assortment of ghostly hybrid creatures. Got the picture? It might look something like Hello Darkness, the latest show at Meanwhile Park’s MINIMO Contemporary Gallery, where a compact space makes unlikely room for the macabre.

MINIMO is a bite-sized outdoor gallery, the front-yard counterpart to Meanwhile Park, the backyard performance space Jeff Paris created at his Salt Lake City home in 2021. While Meanwhile Park hosts intimate theatrical performances behind the house, MINIMO, which staged its first exhibit this summer, puts the front yard to work: a miniature gallery and community art space that passersby can encounter from the street. The gallery’s accessibility is one of its greatest strengths, Paris says. MINIMO prides itself on its walk-up appeal and creative design, which visitors might liken to a “lending library”. Exhibitions use banners, sound, and a gravel walkway to draw in wanderers and fine-art enthusiasts to the display box.

In Hello Darkness, that discovery takes the form of a series of deliciously eerie ceramic and clay figurines by California-based artist duo Doubleparlour. Curated by Paris, the collection presents a series of monochromatic sculptures (each no larger than a standard mason jar) arranged in something of a family portrait. One is a cloaked rabbit, looming over masked children with school-uniform collars. Near the back corner, a long-faced bust frowns within his pale blue elephant costume, while another dons a twisted version of an ancient pharaoh’s crown. Together, the sculptures suggest a gathering place for all things playful and grotesque.

That ambiguity is central to Doubleparlour. Their small scale makes them approachable, but their expressions and posture hold a viewer’s attention. MINIMO co-founder Alexas Lucero points out their matte, scumbled surface, a texture reminiscent of dried gourds or paper-mache dolls. This tactile quality lends the figures a sense of something “found” or homemade by a strange artisan.

Established in 2007, Doubleparlour is the collaborative practice of husband-and-wife artists Ernie and Cassandra Velasco, who work with materials including archival epoxy clay and ceramic. Ernie takes on the majority of hand-sculpting, while Cassandra manages the paint application. Their sculptural universe falls somewhere between designer toy and fine-art object, drawing on the visual style and shape of collectibles while embracing a handmade quality. Their studio practice has continually evolved: what began in 2007 as a series of “Conversations” paintings soon transitioned into wall hangings and eventually freestanding pieces. Their work has appeared at galleries including San Francisco’s Modern Eden, Portland’s Antler Gallery, and Melbourne’s Outré Gallery. Doubleparlour was also nominated for Breakthrough Artist of the Year at the 2013 Designer Toy Awards in New York.

The sculptures found their way to Salt Lake City through Paris’ longtime patronage of the artists. His collection and subsequent correspondence with Doubleparlour initiated the current Exhibition at MINIMO Contemporary. While Hello Darkness features primarily grayscale figurines, Doubleparlour’s broader practice extends into more colorful territory. Recent work includes clowns, straightjacketed teddy bears, and grimacing, cardigan-clad monsters. Across each variation, the same balance persists: sweetness and strangeness are not opposites so much as inseparable qualities.

Velasco welcomes the stories viewers invent about the figures. Though the characters are entirely conceived by Cassandra and Ernie, they harbor small qualities that seem to reference an amalgam of pop culture symbols. Cassandra traces some of the works’ more anthropomorphic aspects to vintage Kaiju, the giant monsters of Japanese popular culture, while others’ stilted poses echo porcelain, Victorian-era ‘Frozen Charlotte’ dolls. Regardless of scale and form, the imagery is clear: an alchemy of tenderness and darkness makes the sculptures as memorable as they are unique.

“Some of the most interesting comments we’ve gotten are from children walking by our tables, at conventions or craft fairs,” Cassandra says. “Sometimes they make faces at the sculpture, or they’ll ask questions like ‘What is the figure thinking?’, or ‘What are they doing?’” Such questions speak to the whimsical possibilities of Doubleparlour’s work. The little characters’ motives and private worlds remain a mystery, but perhaps because they hide nothing in their open postures and mischievous expressions, a story can come to life. The work invites the audience to meet the characters, to notice the tender childishness and darkness that continually inform one another within the figures.

Hello Darkness is a welcome exercise in interpretive storytelling, something that suits MINIMO’s inviting energy. For those passing by Meanwhile Park, MINIMO Gallery becomes a site for dark whimsy, bringing a spirit of the witching season into Salt Lake neighborhoods.

Hello Darkness, MINIMO at Meanwhile Park, Salt Lake City, 719 E. Harrison Ave., through November 30.

All images courtesy of the author.

Anna McIllece

Anna McIllece is a writer and visual artist from central Alaska who lives and works in Salt Lake County, Utah. She holds a BFA in Fine Art from Brigham Young University and approaches art through both studio work and critical inquiry, investigating outsider art, the ancient and cosmic, human ritual, and folk tradition. Forever drawn to the unsettling, she examines how folklore persists and reemerges within contemporary life.