WATERLOO, Iowa — For years, artist Mollie D. Wallace has collected vintage jewelry boxes and miniature everythings.
"I’ve been obsessed by miniatures since I was knee-high to a grasshopper,” the Des Moines native said, with a laugh.
After years spent hauling the collection around from college in New York to New Orleans and finally back to Iowa with her husband and son, Wallace was inspired to create her own “tiny worlds” inside the old jewelry boxes.
Then the coronavirus pandemic hit.
“I was halfway through the first box. I thought it would be a fun thing do during the pandemic – ‘two weeks to flatten the curve,’” Wallace told the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier. “Everything started shutting down – schools, museums, galleries, gigs, libraries, Broadway, restaurants – and my work took a left turn.”
Three years later, Wallace has created nearly 30 mixed media assemblages in a collection she calls “Pandema’s Box,” on exhibit now through June 19 in the Forsberg Gallery at the Waterloo Center for the Arts. A reception is planned for from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. May 19, sponsored by Friends of the Art Center. It is free and open to the public.
Each of Wallace’s creations deals with a specific pandemic-related story or theme from life in quarantine, re-reading epic novels, playing board games, streaming TV shows and movies and teaching the cat to ride the Roomba, to hoarding toilet tissue, home haircuts, pandemic sourdough, Zoom attire, vaccines and the great mask debate.
Each highly detailed story is told in miniature and set in a jewelry box, created in real time as the pandemic. “They became my visual journal as things were happening,” she said.
“Dancing Alone” was her first tiny world. Inside the jewelry box, a ballerina twirls endlessly in an empty opera house. With each revolution, she can spy the skeleton keyhole, a reminder of what happens when an epidemic is unleashed and draconian lockdowns shutter the world, leaving her to wonder if it will ever end.
“All of these vignettes a little bit of everyone’s experiences during COVID. Mollie's boxes connect with people and put those experiences in context. There’s humor, but serious thought, too, about the lives lost and sincere moments that speak to the human condition,” said Chawne Paige, WCA curator.
“I went with my gut with whatever I was working on,” Wallace explained. “If I felt cheeky about something, it’d go with it. If I felt like it was a serious topic or something that emotionally I didn’t think was fun, then I treated in a serious way,” such as boxes about Black Lives Matter or essential workers.
“Hope” was meant to be her final box with the word spelled out like the Hollywood sign in California, inside a clear glass jewelry box.
“I thought I had stopped when we got the vaccine. As long as we have hope, we’ll be OK. Hope is courage and thinking things will get better. I was super-excited to have that box done, then, of course, along came delta, omicron, mandates, boosters.”
And Wallace still isn’t finished. “I thought it would be remiss if I didn’t address Ukraine and the supply chain issues.”
Every Monday, Wallace and her mother, Diane, go “thrifting” at their favorite store. “On Mondays, she gets senior discounts. And I’m not saying where we go because I don’t want other people to get their first. She wanders up and down the aisles finding things for me. She’s kind of an enabler,” the artist said, laughing.
Wallace credits her mom for the box on herd immunity – a collection of miniature animals from unicorns to giraffes corralled into a jewelry box and herded by a lariat-wielding cowboy on horseback. “I also steal a lot of toys from my eight-year-old son. He loves miniatures too. I’ll sneak into his room and take things he doesn’t play with anymore. I have to super-glue them down before he sees them and wants them back,” she said.
The artist earned her degree in design and illustration from Pratt Institute in New York, and her work can be seen throughout Des Moines and New Orleans, including murals, signs and merchandise branding. She also is a portrait artist and works on commission.
WCA gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday.
