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Making A
Mirror Ball

Statement

Mirror balls reflect outwards from the center. The fractals of the gridded mirror capture light and return it back. We pick up the pieces of who and what we are, fixing the tiny pieces of mirrored glass to the form to watch it spin. The mirrors capture fleeting images in their reflections: a blur of nacreous light. Each prism reflects its own vantage. With our final piece set in place, the modern magic lantern spins, filling the room with dazzling specks of incandescent light that flicker and ebb as they are lit by our differences, forever spinning in motion.

The artists in this show utilize repetition and sequence in ways that reveal their impulse to continually explore a theme or topic while piecing together a sense of self. On one end, this compulsion leads to expressive forms of distortion, by shaking loose new forms from the vibrating silhouette of pattern. On the other, it leads to a deep interrogation of authority and to methods of icon deterioration. The artists’ manipulations of reality through their distinct mediums transform their reflections into internal landscapes. Light serves as either subject or object in many of the pieces in the show. Images, at times, reveal an inner glow; and at others, they perform as backdrops for an animation or a puppet show. Repetition occasionally takes the form of geometric abstraction, sometimes patterning. Brush strokes or streaks of fabric accumulate into anxious, searching shapes that are reflected by the unsteadiness and precarious forms of the sculptural work.

The work of Making a Mirror Ball will include the work of 16 artists working in painting, sculpture, photography, and moving images to explore these themes from the undergraduate and graduate programs of Pratt Institute. A large kinetic sculpture by Harry Ray Gordon will divide up the main room, throwing swaying shadows on top of even more moving forms found within Daniel Bottcher’s illuminated shadow puppet show, casting both of these works as actors within the larger exhibition. Two projected screens will play the work of Valentina Asenov, oil paint animations created with a light box, grounding the show in a sense of constant flux. Taken as a whole, the exhibition will consider how light and projection can be used to stage the gallery in operatic terms, and how both moving images and painting can express new forms of discourse in sequence.

Photographic Documentation

Curator Team