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♠️.

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Anita Ekberg

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Corinne Calvet

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Taylor LaShae

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By Freddy Camargo

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Marcel Duchamp was perhaps the first to recognize the unsettling power of multiple reflections in mirrors, and the way they could undo the very notion of a "work of art" (in the age of mirreproduction, to paraphrase Benjamin); I recently shared here one of Duchamp’s own projects of this kind.

Duchamp’s insights opened a beam of inquiry that, decades later, Yayoi Kusama would push to its extreme. With her infinity rooms, she multiplied reality ad infinitum, locking us inside her dizzy, directionless, self-referential mirages - and in a sense placing a logical cap on further artistic exploration in this direction.

And yet the Way of Reflection continues to lure new armies of enthusiastic neophytes. Among them is the US based heather rasmussen, whose photo-multigraph project Mirror Room (2021–22) expands these unfinished (unfinishable?) mirror stories into different registers again.

Some of them are closer to the haunted intimacy of Francesca Woodman.

Others, moving toward to the darker surrealism of Hans Bellmer’s Poupée.

Rasmussen’s multigraphs play with the instability of self-image and the recursive pull of the mirror, refusing closure and instead multiplying ambiguities. The project is large (HUGE even), and there’s no way I can bring all of the works here. Her practice suggests that reflections are perhaps not yet exhausted as a motif: even endless repetitions of endless repetitions can still open unexpected perspectives.

Let all the mirrors reflect their own reflections.

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Paul-Émile Bécat - Enquêtes intime (1926)

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Steven Hanks - "Graceful Flow" - American Artist Watercolor

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Tamara de Lempicka devant le tableau Suzanne au bain avec son modèle Miss Cecelia Meyers photographiées par Otto Bettmann à Beverly Hills en Californie le 14 mai 1940

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Artwork by Lukasz Biel

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