The scale model is the best representation of a concept, a stage between thought and realization, almost the perfect Platonic object. It is not a small copy of a pre-existing entity; it’s a real thing that aspires to another, ideal form.

Roger F. White’s sculpture Untitled (Great Planes) raises the question of scalability and anti site-specificity. Conceived as a maquette for a public art proposal in North Dakota, it is presented here as a sculpture-in-itself, liberated of its relation to local history, weather, structural integrity and institutional bureaucracy.

The work, in its white abstraction in a white cube, may have references to visionary architecture but here it takes on a new life not as a miniature but as a life-size object in the Proxy gallery. This “purely” esthetic and formal aspect allows the sculpture to interact with the gallery space suggesting the scalability or architectural status of the gallery itself.