PROSPECT-LEFFERTS GARDENS — For years, Brooklyn artist Patrick Jacobs created meticulous miniature landscapes in his Ocean Avenue home in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens.
While working there, he said he became “a little bit obsessed” with his apartment, which overlooks Prospect Park. Now, he wants to share that room-with-a-view with his audience through a life-size sculpture he created of a “completely imagined” version of his living room, overlooking the park.
“When you walk into the room, you turn the corner and there you see a cutaway, or rather, a distorted and twisted version of my living room. And if you look out the bay of windows, you see a foreshortened and stretched view of Prospect Park,” he said of the 10-foot-high by 16-foot-wide sculpture.
The piece, named “Interior with View of the Gowanus Heights,” is a larger version of a miniature model he made in 2011 of the same scene, viewed through a circular lense, as are many of his tiny landscapes.
To create the room-sized piece, he and a handful of assistants worked for two years, carefully building walls, furniture, windows and trees into pieces that could be broken apart and transported. By themselves, the leaves on the trees — made with reindeer moss and hole-punched paper — took about six months.
“When you live and work in a space and you’re looking around, you just notice things — the molding, the shape of the room,” he said. “When I look at the installation, I feel like I’m looking inside of my own mind.”
The sculpture was built to fit into the back room at the Pierogi Gallery in Williamsburg, where a show of Jacobs’ work, including several of his miniature sculptures, will open on Friday.
“We pretty slavishly measured the dimensions of the gallery space … including the pipes, the walls, the lighting fixtures ... the whole room is designed around the features,” he said.
Patricks Jacobs’ “Come Closer to Me” exhibit will open with a reception from 7 to 9 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 16 at Pierogi Gallery, located at 177 North 9th St. in Williamsburg. The exhibit runs until Feb. 15.
