"mirror/mask"

I see myself in a dark room facing a two‐way mirror. My camera is set up to shoot whatever I see through the glass. In the room is a single candle providing faint illumination and casting a reflection on the glass. The camera catches simultaneously both the external image and the inner reflection.


The series “mirror/mask” is my attempt to bring together my ideas on the mask and the mirror in order to play out their relationship from an inner perspective on identity. If the face‐as‐mask is engaged in a two‐way conversation between inner and outer realities, between depth and surface, as Duchenne and many of his contemporaries believed – and as is increasingly confirmed today by the neurosciences and related fields – then the mask‐as‐face may also serve the same function.

In ‘mirror/mask” I have personalized – personified – these relationships in order to explore what, if anything, could be learned about how this relationship speaks to the internal processes involved in identity formation. What does the relationship between the mask’s transmissive characteristics and the mirror’s reflective characteristics contribute to an understanding of the internal processes related to the formation of a sense of self, especially from an Asperger’s perspective?

The images speak to the resulting turmoil when choice is denied access to intuition – the image in the mirror reflects but does not inform. What might have been seen as a dialectic is interrupted, is reflected back on itself in a tautology of hyper‐reflexivity.