This was the seventh year that the Ackland Art Museum greeted the holiday season by displaying a miniature house constructed by Gordon Rutherford. This year, the holiday season of 1999, the house was surrounded with prints and photographs that played on the idea of scale.

A model-builder like Mr. Rutherford was accustomed to making something big on a small scale, but sometimes it is the other way around--a science museum may have models of a fly, a DNA molecule, or an atom thousands of times bigger than the real thing. In the same way painters, printmakers, and photographers usually produce images of things that are much smaller than the original, but sometimes they will make the small or big or carefully keep the image the same size as the thing it represents.