Summary

SOIL Artist-Run Gallery is presently occupying 11,000 square feet of the Seattle Design Center in Georgetown. Curated by SOIL, the exhibition brings together new and old members in an expansive space that usually contains furniture. SOIL celebrates this breadth of physical space as a unique opportunity to stretch, and to collaborate in a drawing installation that will grow throughout the length of the three-month exhibition.

Project Description

I am fascinated by several versatile properties of concave mirrors:

1. To project images on flat surfaces, this is a technique understood to be used by Renaissance artists in order to reproduce reality accurately—Secret of Knowledge by David Hockney and Charles Falco, 2006 Viking Studio.

2. To enlarge and

3. To flip and reverse the image they mirror.

To further observe the third optical property, I have installed a concave mirror to face a text reading ‘take my text for it’ spelled upside-down on the wall of a room at the Seattle Design Center. When we observe any object, the image of the object appears upside down and in reverse on the retina. Entering the room, I encourage people to stand between the mirror and the text at a point where the text reads right-side up and at the same time they see themselves in reverse and upside-down in the mirror. The work plays a pun on words: ‘text’ and ‘word’, together with the mirror reversing and flipping the space upside-down. Words are taken hostage by figures of speech in the same way we are held hostage by ‘normal’ ways we experience the world. Being in the room, between the mirror and the text—with the text appearing right-side up—and seeing oneself standing upside-down and reversed—surprises and challenges us as to the ways we conventionally perceive and inhabit space.