Mirrorers

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Shirin Abedinirad Babel Tower, Iran, 2016
‘Her motorized Babel Tower stands tall within its surroundings, and can at times disappear into the natural landscape before catching a glint of the setting sun and reflecting it back to her viewers.’

 

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Devorah Sperber Transporter: Kirk and Spock Beaming-In (2008)
2 beaded figures hanging in front of mirror panels installed in a corner to create the illusion of 6 figures beaming in, 100,000+ loose beads on mixed medium platform.

 

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Simon Starling Venus Mirror (2012)
Venus mirror (05/06/2012, Hawaii & Tahiti inverted), 2012, invokes the perceptual, distorting and inverting effects of cameras obscura, speculum mirrors found in telescopes, magnifying glasses and photographic lenses. The mirror presents the 2012 transit as it was observed in June 2012 from Tahiti and Hawaii – sites visited by the artist and significant in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century observations.

 

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Carsten Höller Sliding Doors (2003)
Sliding Doors consists of five electronic sliding doors with mirrored surfaces on both sides, through which a viewer can walk in an apparently endless passage. The doors are installed at evenly-spaced intervals in a corridor-like space and are connected to motion sensors that cause them to slide open when someone approaches and close shut when the person moves away. As a result, the movements of viewers alternately break and bind the visual limits of the space, which can be entered from either end of the corridor, increasing the likelihood of unexpected encounters as the doors open and close.

 

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John Baldessari Reverse/Repeat Series: Spoons, Peas, Jars, etc., 2001
‘A visual conundrum of criss-cross, back to front, left and right, condenses a sequence of actions in one single photogram that traces them all. The resulting symmetry and graceful patterns stand out from the ordinary of the depicted gestures and prevail over our expectations of cause and effect.’

 

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Felix Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (Orpheus, Twice) (1991)

 

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Zhao Zhao Constellations, 2021-2022
Embroidery on silk

 

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Christopher Madden Untitled, 2023
mirrors, fingers

 

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Urs Fischer Various works (2013)

 

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Jeppe Hein Mirror Wall (2009)
A huge mirror is mounted onto a wall. When visitors enter the space the mirror starts moving subtly and wavelike. Visitors facing the mirror will be irritated by the vibrating reflection of themselves and their surrounding. This sensation causes not only a vague feeling of dizziness but also a latent distrust of one’s own eyes and spatial perception. As the mirror displays a different picture of the location, viewers question their position in the room.

 

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Mario Klingemann Uncanny Mirror, 2018
‘Made by a neural network that has been trained to make faces from 68 given face marker coordinates. For this experiment the model has only been trained on the face of Françoise Hardy using material from 7 different music clips.’

 

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Tatiana Trouvé From here I disappear (2009)
From here I disappear is a tantalising series of plexiglass doors and mirrors that form a threshold we can only cross mentally, yet that opens a vista of multiple possibilities.

 

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Eduard Locota Laocoon Mirror Sculpture with Augmented Reality, 2016
‘THE SCULPTURE IS NOT ONLY AN ARTWORK IN ITSELF, BUT ALSO SERVES A UTILITARIAN PURPOSE: AS A MIRROR. NOT ONLY CONNECTING THE VIEWER WITH THE INSIDE OF THE ARTWORK, BUT ALSO BEING ABLE TO CONTEMPLATE ITSELF, IN IT’S REFLECTION.’

 

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John Miller Lost (2016)
The labyrinthine installation, aptly titled Lost, has been constructed in the Atrium Gallery at ICA Miami as part of a solo exhibition of Miller’s work. Covering approximately 74 square metres, the site-specific maze is built from acrylic mirrors mounted on wood frames. “With the mirrored labyrinth, Miller creates an environment that disorients by creating reflections of the self,” said Alex Gartenfeld, the museum’s deputy director and chief curator. Both the external walls and internal partitions are covered in mirrors, arranged to encompass the room’s structural columns and create a winding route.

 

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Lucas Samaras Corridor #2, 1970
50-foot-long walk-though hall of mirrors

 

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Hank Willis Thomas Amelia falling, 2014
‘Hank Willis Thomas’s Amelia falling is derived from an archival photograph taken by photojournalist Spider Martin during the Selma to Montgomery marches in Alabama in 1965.’

 

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Keith Arnatt Self-Burial with Mirror, 1969
‘A black-and-white photographic self-portrait in which his whole body, save his head, is buried. In it, the back of his head faces the camera, while a mirror placed opposite his visage reveals its reflection to the viewer.’

 

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Alfredo Pirri Contemporary Steps (2011)
An official runs along a broken mirror art installation by Italian artist Alfredo Pirri as visitors tour contemporary art displayed at the war bunker, near the town of Konjic, just south of Sarajevo, Bosnia. The once secret bunker, built to shelter Yugoslavia’s Marshal Josip Broz Tito and the communist leadership from a nuclear war, is some 280 metres underground.

 

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Michelangelo Pistoletto Mirror Paintings (1962 – 1982)
‘Michelangelo Pistoletto began painting on mirrors in 1962, connecting painting with the constantly changing realities in which the work finds itself.’

 

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Jim Hodges Folding (into a Greater World) (1998)
Folding (into a greater world) is a 6-by-8 foot surface covered in small, square chips of mirror that cast mottled light onto the gallery walls. Imperfectly aligned rows and columns keep these works in motion; a rigorous grid would make them too stiff and static. Such unpredictability stifles the handy shortcuts we normally use to make quick cognitive decisions—judgements made to register stimuli without getting bogged down in the process of really looking. In Hodges’ work, small tiles, chips and light bulbs fail to coalesce into holistic images so we are forced to study each individual component.

 

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Random International Audience, 2008
‘Audience consists of a large crowd of head-size mirror objects. Each object moves its head in a particular way to give it different characteristics of human behaviour. Some chat amongst themselves, some shy away and others confidently move to grab your attention. When members of the audience enter the perimeter of the installation, the mirrors inquisitively follow someone that they find interesting. Having chosen their subject, they all synchronise and turn their heads towards them. Suddenly that person can see their reflection in all of the mirrors. They will watch this person until they become disinterested, then either seek out another subject or return to their private chatter. The suddenly synchronised collective behaviour of the objects is beyond the control of the viewer, as it is left entirely to their discretion to let go of their subject.’

 

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Sylvie Fleury Razor Blades (2000)

 

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Mike Kelley Silver Ball (1994)
Aluminum foil, polyurethane foam, wood, chicken wire, speakers, four boom boxes, space blanket, three baskets, artificial fruit, and audio

 

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Daniel Rozin Penguins Mirror (2015)
450 stuffed animals, motors, control electronics, xbox kinect motion sensor, mac-mini computer, custom software, tin bases, mirror

 

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Oscar Muñoz Aliento (Breath) (1996–2002)
The work is made up of highly polished metal disks, the surface of which has been printed using a grease photosilkscreen process. Viewers have to breathe on the surface of the disks to reveal pictures of victims of political violence. Using photographs taken out of their original context, the work acts as a visual and political metaphor exploring the theme of disappearance.

 

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Sam Durant Partially Buried 1960s/70s Dystopia Revealed (Mick Jagger at Altamont) & Utopia Reflected (Wavy Gravy at Woodstock) (1998)
Two rectangular mirrors lie on the floor with mounds of dirt, large enough to conceal a body but in actuality covering speakers playing two different soundtracks simultaneously. Both are edited to stop and start in a stuttering manner: one of Wavy Gravy welcoming the audience to Woodstock, the other of Mick Jagger pleading with the Altamont crowd with phrases like, “Why are we fighting?” Recalling Smithson’s “non-sites” comprised of piles of earth taken from an exterior site and placed within geometric containers or right-angled mirror constructions in the gallery space along with other documentation of the site, Durant alters perceptions of these minimalist constructions. Through the use of scale and sound he transforms the raw materials into a statement about the disillusionment felt at the end of the 1960s.”

 

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Olafur Eliasson Sometimes the river is the bridge, 2020
‘A basin of water is placed in the center of the darkened space, while the reflections of twelve lights illuminating the surface of the water create various shadows on the circular screen wall above. The ripples caused by the gentle stirrings of the water surface take on a variety of forms, inviting the viewer to partake in a state of deep contemplation that resonates with these water ripples.’

 

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Mungo Thomson TIME, 2019
‘When you stand in front of one of the mirrors, you imagine myself on the cover of TIME? Not exactly. They are vanity but also vanitas. Yes, you are on the cover of TIME, but you are also going to die. The work is both fun and cruel. I was referencing novelty TIME mirrors from the 1970s. I like drawing from sources like that, such as wall calendars, because they are already art-adjacent, or surrogates for art. I scaled the novelty mirrors to my own height so they would be large enough to reflect the viewer and their context.’

 

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Rafaël Rozendaal In Motion, 2011
‘The show consists of mirrors and projections crammed in a tiny space. I will rearrange the exhibition for one week, making it a different installation every day.’

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! It’s a simple refreshing trick, but it works, yes. I too make an effort to refrain. Otherwise there’d be amusement park posts and GbV gigs here every week. Ah, a preventative act on love’s part. Very humane. I don’t know what pissed off my leg, no. It just started for no known reason. I’m getting the feeling that when you get older, weird body stuff starts happening, just like they say it does in the movies and so on. How disappointing. It is a pretty good name. The street I live on in Paris has a kind of good or at least very French name: Rue du Chevalier de Saint George. Not bad, right? Love covering or coating everything (except you) in your apartment with a mirrored surface for one hour and blocking your door so you can’t leave *sorry*, G. ** Tosh Berman, Hi. I have a chiropractor I can go see if need be, and need is beginning to seem like a be. Thank you for caring. It’s slightly improving, but very, very gradually. ** _Black_Acrylic, Ooh, I really like that title and I also really like that premise! Very nice, maestro. How did it deal with the class context? ** Jack Skelley, Jazzbo! Bootsy is the shit! Entwistle wrote a bunch of great Who songs: ‘Whiskey Man’, ‘Silas Stingy’, ‘My Wife’, ‘Fiddle About’, ‘Heaven and Hell’, … Lemmy, sure duh. Mike Watt = impeccable. I’ll get the Sasha Frere-Jones. One sentence-long chapters! Bristing, throbbing day to you, Bernard Edwards. ** Steve Erickson, I know they plan to, and I hope they will. Can’t imagine those books are money makers. Yes, I’ve never heard of Frieda Grabe. I probably have that Grove Press anthology, but it’s in LA, if so. I hope your tonight is generous with the REMs. ** Uday, Hi. As I was trying to imagine a bird perspective novel yesterday, the difficulties of pulling that off did spring to mind. But I’m going to give it a little more gestating time before I trash it. If you did write that story, you are a god, sir! I do reminder our Buddy Holly back-and-forth. How curious, him and LR. And why not? Funny about those least expected hung guys. You probably don’t know this weird character actor from the 50s/60s named Wally Cox. He was very famous when I was a kid. Kind of like a schlumpier, less cute, much nerdier Buddy Holly. Anyway, it turned out he was not only apparently huge hung but was the great secret love of Marlon Brando. If what I read is correct, Brando even had his ashes buried alongside Wally Cox’s. You never just never know. ** Charalampos, I fear you may have to do that, yes. You have some superb bookage coming your way, that’s for sure. Good vibes from my apartment, the editing room, and all locales in-between. ** Meredith Brody, Hi, Meredith! It’s so lovely to see you, And thank you so, so much for that very good news about David. He was a commenter here almost every day like clockwork for years, and then he just stopped coming suddenly, and it was when I knew he was in a rough patch after Bill’s death, and I’ve been quite worried about him, and what a relief to hear he’s well situated and okay. I too will do my best to see him when I get to LA next time, hopefully in the next couple of months. Thank you again. I hope everything is as splendid as possible with you. Love, me. ** Uday, Hi. I just checked, and you’re right, it’s ‘suspended’, whatever that means. I don’t have anything to do with that site, but I will contact the person who does it and let him know or find out what’s going on. Yikes. Thanks a lot for letting me know. You okay and better than? ** Justin, Hi. Yeah, I almost said ‘Idaho’, but I was afraid that would seem like too obvious a pick, but, yeah, that’s probably my fave too when it comes down to it. And thank you a lot about ‘TMS’! It’s so good to hear. That’s my favorite of my novels, if I have to pick. I love that it and ‘Period’ are special faves. You’re my dream reader. Cool, yeah, thanks. What’s the latest with you and yours? ** F, Hi, F. It’s very nice to meet you. I’ll happily read your poem as soon as I get out of the p.s., which will be, well, very soon since yours is the last comment. I look forward to it. And congratulations! And please come back, if you feel like it, and I’ll get my thoughts about your poem in order. Happy day! ** Right. Today the blog requests that you think about the mirror as a creative source using the examples piled up above as a starting point, I suppose. See you tomorrow.