Encaustic House, Zachary Armstrong
Midwest Art Review
Frame Story: Zachary Armstrong’s Encaustic House
At The Weston Art Gallery, Encaustic House transforms the dollhouse from an object we observe into a space we inhabit.
By Hannah Kasper | July 19, 2026
To begin to unravel Encaustic House by Zachary Armstrong, on view for the first time in the U.S. at Cincinnati’s Weston Art Gallery, is to question our universal fascination with miniatures.
Miniatures have been used over the centuries through consistent appearances in the history of art and icon. The miniature takes us back to the ancient Egyptians, who buried the dead with clay representations of everything they may have needed in the afterlife — tools, animals, furniture, and servants all small enough to hold in one’s hand. Miniatures have appeared in both the East and the West; in home shrines that served as miniaturizations of temple statuaries and, during Medieval times, when saints were miniaturized as talismans.
“Transcendence and the interiority of history and narrative are the dominant characteristics of the most consummate of miniatures — the dollhouse.” — Susan Stewart, “On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection”
The dollhouse is itself a historical object, the earliest known example a 1558 German model, made for a Bavarian duke. It both bases itself in history yet resists time, having the capacity to recreate other eras.
Experienced as fantasy, the dollhouse represents an experience that is inaccessible in real life. The signified, or original object, is often an unattainable space of luxury, from Mrs. James Ward Thorne’s models at The Art Institute of Chicago, to the Barbie Dream House.
The connection between miniature form and fantasy is based largely in its relationship to childhood. Dolls, toy soldiers, model railroads, tiny stoves and dishes are all familiar playthings. Children are encouraged to aspire to adulthood, to assume roles and to perform them in the act of pretend. Ironically, it is the element of imagination so strong in children that is often lost in adulthood.
As Gaston Bachelard wrote in The Poetics of Space, “the tiny things we imagine simply take us back to childhood, to familiarity with toys and the reality of toys.”
See also, Baudelaire’s 1853 essay The Philosophy of Toys (Morale du joujou), which argues that because toys can evoke emotions, people, and places long gone, they serve as a child’s first introduction to concrete art and abstraction.
The facility for gratifying one’s imagination is evidence of the spirituality of childhood in its artistic conceptions. The toy is the child’s earliest initiation into art. — Charles Baudelaire, The Philosophy of Toys
To liberate oneself from the obligations of dimension, to lose some sense of spatial perspective, instinctually encourages the use of imagination. To see detail in small things requires such attention that to experience it detaches you from the surrounding world.
What Armstrong has done with Encaustic House is turn this detachment on its head. A 24 x 22 x 11-foot structure made up of 26 encaustic paintings, the viewer is made to interact in a more physical manner. The most opaque distinction in enlarging the scale is that you can physically enter the work. This brings it out of the nostalgia trap so often associated with renditions of historic and domestic interiors and, specifically, ones that reference the miniature.
Despite Armstrong’s image bank of personal and childhood references, his version of the dollhouse removes nostalgia, replacing it with participation.
There are many reasons why painters are persuaded to work big, from the psychology of the sublime to the justification of the price tag. There is also the unfortunate question of seriousness. The small and the domestic in art are often gendered towards the feminine and branded as childish or craft-forward.
Enlarging the dollhouse back to life-size brings it firmly out of the feminine realm and into the masculine. It is no longer a dream world of playing house, but a statement of physical assertion.
The monumental ambition of Encaustic House would be aggressive if you weren’t invited to puzzle out the imagery contained within. It’s this imagery that saves it from the binary.
Bachelard, who described the house as a metaphor for the soul and memory, spoke of the “dialectic of large and small.” He didn’t see them as opposites, but as different paths to the same end — an expansion of imagination. He spoke of the “intimate immensity” of the gigantic, the expansiveness of which holds a mirror to the vastness of our inner worlds.
The original dollhouse that inspired Encaustic House was a gift to Armstrong from the family of his mentor, the Dayton, Ohio-based painter, Curtis Barnes, Sr. In the years following Barnes’ death, the tiny cottage became a focal point in Armstrong’s Dayton studio. He began envisioning a series of paintings based on his interaction with the object.
In 2019 Armstrong had the opportunity to make an exhibition for the Faurschou Foundation in Beijing. He decided that the dollhouse would be the center of this project, not as a sequence of traditional paintings, but as an actual house made up of many paintings.
Over the next two years he designed the house in great detail. The facade would remain faithful to the original. The interior would be filled with Armstrong’s visual lexicon — art historical references, personal anecdotes, contemporary Americana. It eventually arrived in China in 10 enormous crates and was installed at the height of the pandemic. Until its arrival at the Weston, Armstrong had never seen the completed work fully assembled.
Armstrong is a painter known for playing with space and pushing the edge of the frame. In Encaustic House, the gallery floor becomes the floor of the house. Canvas paintings mounted to panels make up the walls. The raw stretched edges of the canvases peek out from the house’s ceiling, reminding us that this is, first, a painting.
Faux bois woodgrain on the second floor is created by carving lines into the encaustic before it dries — the pigments mixed with beeswax and damar varnish dry instantaneously as the medium is brushed onto the surface of the canvas. Our perspective of the upstairs floor is a child’s perspective, looking up from below. We strain to see the details on those walls.
The house isn't simply enlarged. It is enlarged without abandoning the visual logic of childhood. Adults become the size of children. Encaustic House wraps us in wonder.
Susan Stewart believes dollhouses are meant to be viewed one room — or scene — at a time, as in the chapters of a story. Encaustic House creates a frame story in which there are several reinterpreted realities stacked within one another.
Film theorists (Andre Bazin, Pascal Bonitzer) have spoken of the "blind field” — everything that exists just outside the camera's frame. What isn't shown often carries as much imaginative weight as what is. Paintings operate in much the same way. Every composition implies a larger world beyond its edges, inviting viewers to mentally complete the scene.
Encaustic House performs a curious reversal. Rather than imagining what exists outside the frame, viewers step inside it. The picture plane expands, and the spectator becomes part of the composition itself. Armstrong removes the frame entirely.
It is a feat to create a painting of an interior that lacks human representation without it becoming a commentary on absence. Because of the scale of Encaustic House, and the ability for the viewer to physically enter the space of the painting, it doesn’t matter that there is no protagonist depicted. The main character is the audience — all of us.
It is the very absence of figures which makes the Art Institute Thorne Rooms so compelling. The rooms are somehow incomplete until we exercise our imagination and populate this amazing miniature world. We must furnish the crucial missing ingredient — life — which is why we can stand riveted. We are not just the audience any more, we are the playwright and the stage director as well. The Thorne Rooms become for us a springboard into our own imaginations, a vast array of stage sets waiting for the drama that only our fantasies can create. — Bruce Hatton Boyer
All three solo exhibitions simultaneously on view at The Weston Art Gallery deal in varying approaches with interior spaces. The audiences which they address may vary — Bridgette Bogle’s practice is intertwined with motherhood and caretaking, Aaron Coleman’s with race and class — but the relationship to the body is inseparable.
The human emptiness of the rooms in a dollhouse serve as an alluring suggestion of narrative, encouraging the viewer’s use of imagination. However, Armstrong’s house is not empty, it is not small, and it is not unsettling. It teems with imagery, both familiar and cryptic.
We, the viewers, give this dollhouse life. We are the characters inhabiting its space.
Zachary Armstrong: Encaustic House
Bridgette Bogle: Bad Boundaries
Aaron Coleman: Sentinels
Through August 30, 2026 at Weston Art Gallery, Aronoff Center, Cincinnati, OH
Artist round table with Zachary Armstrong, Raúl de Nieves, Gina Beavers and Trey Abdella Friday, August 28, 2026 6 p.m. at Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center Black Box Theater Followed by a reception at the Weston Art Gallery from 7–9 p.m.