A Total Instance of Reflexivity, Sigeneity, Eritrea/Naivasha, Kenya, C-Prints, Plywood & Black Plexiglass, Portraits & Black Mirrors 20 x 24 x 4 inches each, Landscapes 48 x 60 x 6 inches each, , 200
A Total Instance of Reflexivity reconfigures two traditions of glass/optic devices in art. The Claude or Black Mirrors of 18th-19th century Europe and Souwer-underglass painting genre of Senegal. The work consists of portraits that depict me from the side, black Plexiglass panels, and two large landscape photographs of East Africaʼs Rift Valley. The piece is my version of a rügenfigure image. Unlike David Casper Friedrichʼs rügenfigure in Wander Above the Sea of Fog, the rügenfigure in A Total Instance of Reflexivity looks into a black void. This void is a remembrance of a place; unrepresentable in that it exists in memory, and its contours and features are different for each person. The landscape that the figure should be contemplating is in a separate panel, disconnected from the view that the rügenfigure-and by extension the viewer of the work-would traditionally be gazing at.