Arguments about true human nature are a cornerstone of the Western philosophical canon. Optimists like John Locke believed life before governmental rule was a magnanimous paradise, while pessimists like Thomas Hobbes believed life before a ruler was “nasty, brutish, and short.” Washington-based miniaturist Abigail Goldman leans begrudgingly towards the latter. Her latest solo exhibition, State of Nature with Hashimoto Contemporary, explores the brutal impulses typically suppressed in everyday life on a 1:87 scale. Goldman uses her bloody miniature dieoramas not to shock but to present complex and seemingly absurd narratives of human compulsions that bubble below the surface.