Artist Statement
'How "real" was a mask, or the painting of a face, or a reflection in
a mirror? Did its reality depend on the moment of perception, when the
public saw the actor act, or when someone looked upon the features
of a loved one dead, or when someone caught his or her own likeness
in a circle of polished metal? Or did the reality of these images have
an ongoing existence, beyond the eye of the beholder?'(Manguel
159-160).
According to a French psyhiatrist Jacques Lacan: 'the child identifies
with an outside image, a mirror image, which both allows him mastery
over his body and provokes in him an essential sense of alienation. This
identification with an image takes place about eighteen months: prior to
that age, "infants do not seem to know what they are seeing in a mirror
is their own reflection," says the American psychiatrist Daniel N. Stern. "
This can be shown by surreptitiously marking infants' faces with rouge,
so that they are unaware that the mark has been placed. When younger
infants see their reflections, they point to the mirror and not to
themselves. After the age of eighteen months or so, they touch the rouge
on their own faces instead of just pointing to the mirror. They now know
that they can be objectified, that is, represented in some form that exists
outside of their subjectively felt selvs." (Manguel 162-163).
This current work investigates how one's seeing of reality is distorted,
a reflection of self, and that a reflection has a reality beyond the moment
of seeing it.
Manguel, Alberto. Reading Pictures:A History of Love and Hate. Random House, Inc., New York.200. |