beyond narcissus 02

BEYOND NARCISSUS kiállítás 02 - Mirrors and displacements

Andrea Blum Body Image, 1994, Mixed media, 107 x 107 x 61 cm, Courtesy of the artist
„The use of mirrors in public places tends to upset the symbolic network of the signs and images that define a city. Andrea Blum utilizes the potential disturbances of the mirror in her architecture and furniture pieces, redefining the private sphere in a public place. In this spirit, her work, Body Image (1994) consists of an oversized armchair with a reflective back that captures the landscape, as well as those seated there. The infinite duplication of the reflections helps to create spaces of pure ambivalence and ambiguity. In one of her projects, she proposes creating a public fountain five meters in diameter which at its center has a concave mirror: people can share the water while also contemplating the spectacle of the firmament. As Andrea Blum puts it, “The project is a structural representation of the Narcissus myth, manipulated to function in a social space.”

"A Ferran Martín video shows him carrying a closed mirror-cube as he wanders around the construction of the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine or waits in the elevator of the Queens Museum of Art. The images reflected take on expressive and at times, absurd dimensions. For Martín, a Spanish artist, “mirror displacements” are metaphors of shifts of identity in an unknown space, or a space revisited in a new light. The artist himself seems to roam in a search for identity. El Modulor (2001- 2004) (whose title is inspired by a work by le Corbusier) is a work that is essentially turned towards the other, forever wavering between memory and reality, absence and presence."

Patrick Killoran (1972) Glass Outhouse, 2002, Mixed media, 231 x 110 x 199 cm, Courtesy of the artist
"Patrick Killoran creates a functional portable toilet (Glass Outhouse, 2002) made of a two-way mirror, from the inside of which the user can see the passers-by through its transparent walls. The utilitarian nature of the object and the force of the questioning it incites in viewers make them stop to observe their reflections. The artist takes pleasure in detracting—with humor and irony—the apparent neutrality of urban space in order to send unexpected messages."