It’s little wonder we Americans are feeling small, despite our nation’s massive carbon footprint, enormous economy ($13.8 trillion GNP) and gargantuan military-industrial complex. There are still forces greater than we are. Consider the weather. Over the past five years California wild fires, severe droughts, Hurricane Katrina and regional floods have overpowered the government’s resources, decimated states and reduced vibrant neighborhoods to unlivable ruins.

That’s not all. Economic forces have sent us tumbling into a recession. Our homes are worth less than the mortgages we pay, our personal debt is rising, the price of oil has blown past $100 a barrel, job opportunities have diminished and the dollar has shrunk to half the size of the Euro.

Beginning to get that shrinking feeling? There’s more. Google Earth! It peers down on the planet, photographing and mapping our Lilliput buildings, streets and yards. Traffic cams! Drivers in small towns and big cities are surveilled ’round the clock, summer and winter, day and night, the trajectory of their vehicles often broadcast live on cable TV. When drivers arrive home, they find computer-generated fines in their mailbox. The alarm-colored envelope announces our moving violation, captured on video three weeks before.

Those of us who may feel the smallest reside in the biggest cities. Consider New York City. Its two tallest buildings and 2,750 lives were peeled to the ground with breath-taking speed. All it took was two determined suicide hijackers. Then there are the daily urban reminders: news helicopters, police surveillance cameras, store security cams, tourists on the observation deck of the Empire State Building, the live studio audience in MTV’s TRL studio overlooking Times Square, the Statue of Liberty holding its golden flame high over the city’s harbor — they all look down on us as we hurry, ant-like through the streets and into the subways.

Certain American artists take our diminishment as the subject of their art practice. Some have a clear political perspective. Others focus on the existential dilemma. Then there are those whose work reflects the rhetoric of history, literature, cinema or theater. In every case the work allows us to oversee something smaller and more manageable than ourselves, to view our predicament from a safe distance, on a manageable scale. Even better, we escape the dis-ease we associate with viewing contemporary art. Looking at these small-scale worlds, we know the work is “good.” We don’t need an expert to tell us. You can’t fake mastery on a scale of 1:12.

Consider Long Islander Joe Fig. He makes fascinating, detailed scale models of famous artists in their studios. The tableaux mesmerize, especially when paired with recorded interviews between Fig and the artists. We play voyeur, eavesdrop on the conversations while luxuriating in a god’s-eye view of art’s inner sanctum. It’s a privileged moment, as if we were touching the hem of creativity.

Portland artist Ryan Boyle works in a number of ways, with paper, thread and found materials that gather a cluttered momentum that approach static animation. He often creates wall-mounted installations, some that include small-scale buildings reminiscent of “stables, canneries, granaries, prisons or gas chambers,” each linked to the next by long Shoots and Ladders-like stairs that zig-zag up and down the gallery walls. The overall effect is of a silent world of cogs, coils, vents and wheels that, nevertheless, chug, crank, puff and clang in our heads. It’s a child-like vision of a manufacturing world that has gone somewhere else.

Jeremy Mora, a graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago, constructs tiny dramas out of broken bits of buildings, found objects, wire and modeling materials. His scenes freeze on vaguely ominous still points in which tiny people are forced to navigate a dangerous moment. The use of debris, with its implication of decay and destruction, brings a heaviness to each of Mora’s moments, perhaps because the work has an obvious fragility by virtue of their scale. A small chunk of cement seems to hold the full weight of the building it once was. A rounded mound of AstroTurf holds global implications. A small “stone,” on which several miniature men stand stranded, seems as threatening and dangerous as a boulder.

At first glance, the art of Michael Peter Smith appears as easy as making mud pies. But his frank presentation of artifice belies that impression. Oozing seams, egg-carton inside-out molds, and brass or steel armatures support or envelope his precarious narratives. One of Smith’s most compelling works is a low-brow, cracked earthen skull that may or may not be fully human (see the image above). It is populated with tiny earthen homes reminiscent of an archaeological dig. This is a far cry from British artist Damian Hirst’s platinum and diamond-studded “For the Love of God.”

Smith’s lumpy “asteroids” (actually made from ABS plastic, styrene, urethane resines, urethane foams, paper mache, epoxy putty and aqua resin) cut away to reveal tiny furnished “life pods.” It’s a science fiction of human isolation, in a nut shell. A third work depicts a beat-up blue pickup on a precarious pile-up that reads as a mountainous slope. The scene prompts us to wonder how far he is from the main road—from help. It is a movie moment. Despite the artifice, we wonder what will happen next.