Dawson Looking Glass, 2015
with Petran Kockelkoren
This is both a performance and photo-documentation of the same. They both function for me each as works in their own right. Starting out as a slightly tongue-in-cheek rumination on slapstick comedy played out in a frontier town, these images directly reference a Robert Smithson photograph of a mirror on the ground and become another antagonism to both Landscape as a genre and the exclusive use of the photographic ‘picturesque’ to record and re-present Landscape. With thanks to Petran Kockelkoren.
"In an infuential 1978 essay “Photography en abyme,” Craig Owens considers the mirror as it appeared in the nineteenth-century photographs of Lady Hawarden, in Brassai’s mirror-filled photographs of mid-century Parisian café culture, and in the modern, conceptual art of Robert Smithson. By including the reflective surface of mirrors as elements within the photographic image, Owens argues, these photographers effect a reduplication of photography’s mirroring of the world. In these instances photography shows itself to be engaged in a self-reflexive process, a process that puts the operations of the apparatus in relation to the operations of the image. In Brassai’s photographs, Owens observes, mirrors establish possible networks of relationships while also creating a sense of division within the image. These photographs create a sense of fragmentation within the image that is a reduplication of the photographic presentation of the world as a selection of fragmentary reflections.For Owens, this folding of photography in on itself and on its representations of the world establishes an idea of photography as infinitely receding within, and supplementing itself.”
Randy Innes, from Andrew Wright: Pretty Lofty & Heavy All At Once 2016