Setting for a Meta-Vanity Table:
Trans-dimensional Looking Glasses
Objects with an imagined place in history, these pieces deconstruct the limits of linear time, allowing for an expansion in the potential of self-reflection. They act as temporal glitches—mirror-fragments from alternate timelines—inviting contemplation not only of who we are, but of who we’ve been and who we might yet become. Through this rupture in sequence, what begins as ornament becomes ontology. Acts that have often been derided as vanity can—through reflecting upon the possibilities of the expansive, complex self—be re-ascribed as moments of invitation and investigation. What might seem, at first, like vanity begins to summon intirigue: to see oneself seeing, to enter the infinite regress of role, mask, memory, and becoming.
These pieces form the setting for a meta-vanity: not a mirror for vanity’s sake, but for multiplicity’s sake—a site of recursive self-observation where the boundaries of gender, history, and authorship dissolve. These mirrors provide a locus of self-presentation and re-presentation, multiplying and superimposing several selves simultaneously. They shimmer not with resolution, but with recursion. These works honor artists who dared to dress themselves in fractured reflections—figures who understood identity as rehearsal, costume, rupture, ritual. This series reflects them, refracts them, and invites you to look again. To perform identity as they did—not as a stable core but as a spiraling, generative force. Their practices—and these pieces—suggest that the mirror is not merely a place of self-regard, but of transfiguration.
Each work is a seed—part of an imagined/eventual installation built to house the altars of alter-egos: complete meta-vanity sets dedicated to artists who used the illusion of self to crack something open.
Trans-dimensional Looking Glass for Organic Honey
2020
Trans-dimensional Looking Glass for Rrose Sélavy
2020