Sweet and tart battlegrounds: The Sisters Duennebier’s Tale of Candy

 

Imagine Henry Darger and Joseph Cornell getting together and concocting a story of the Vivian Girls doing battle inside a box. That is more or less what sisters Nicole and Caitlin Duennebier have created in the window of SPACE Gallery, that opened April 25.

Store windows act as physical and psychological barriers, separating you from what you ostensibly desire and admire. Dioramas, literally meaning "through that which is seen," are distancing devices too, allowing for only an indirect relationship of viewership, often through glass. Designed for frontal, exclusionary viewing, they relate environmental habitats or historical events, including battles, as authoritative narratives. Early-19th-century paper theaters include a stage set and cutout characters to be manipulated.