presence/absence of an other

Karen LaMonte

"These photographs showed the faces, and sometimes the hands, of people expressing various emotions. These works complement the lack of faces and facial expression on the glass statues, albeit somewhat ambiguously. The artist looked at the seventeenth-century French artist Charles Lebrun’s book on the expression of the passions, and asked her models to try to express some of the basic emotions he illustrated. The resulting selected images were then etched onto the back of the mirrors, only appearing at certain moments when the image catches the light in a particular way, rather like a daguerreotype. Fleetingly glimpsed, the image then disappears, yet the reflection of the viewer is always there in the mirror. Thus the image of the self in the mirror (in so far as we are beguiled into believing its reflected correspondence with us) is linked to the presence/absence of an other, who seemingly emerges out of nothing attempting to communicate with us, and then dematerialises once more."

by Gen Doy, Professor of History and Theory of Visual Culture, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK.

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