Get Ready to Shoot Yourself

The installation Get Ready to Shoot Yourself is based on a publicity photograph from the 1948 Orson Welles film The Lady From Shanghai. From the moment I saw the image, I envisioned a site-specific project that would play off the ambiguity and complexity of the famous mirror maze scene’s fragmented architectural space to intentionally confuse and disorient the viewer, as well as to allow a dual feeling of intimacy and infinity to exist as spatial and temporal representations. My project creates a hybrid interaction that further disorients the viewer by juxtaposing paintings of mirrors, real mirrors, empty mirror frames, and slow motion film captures of the destruction of mirrors from the actual film scene. Get Ready to Shoot Yourself is about the “mirroring” or reflection between these mediated images, and how the viewer is placed in a disorienting position outside the film, yet while experiencing the project, s/he is physically lead into the film’s space and narrative. The design of the installation allows for the empty frames and the framed mirrored/painted panels to be re-configured in any combination, to meet certain space restrictions, or to alter how the illusion functions.