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Mirrors (2020)
Mirrors is a series of photo-based digital collages composed through a dense accumulation of layered imagery that gradually dissolves into darkness. This process of visual sedimentation echoes the overwhelming saturation of images that defines our contemporary media environment—an endless scroll of sensory input that numbs, distracts, and obscures. The images, like social media feeds or algorithmically curated content, begin with a density that eventually erases itself. What remains is the residue of vision: frames of almost nothing, black rectangles bordered by faint textures and ghostly marks.
In this sense, Mirrors engages directly with the crisis of overexposure—the hyper-visibility of daily life where every moment is mediated, archived, and algorithmically magnified. These works are not mirrors in the conventional sense. Rather than reflect back our likenesses or expectations, they absorb them. They echo the kind of “black mirror” referenced in the eponymous TV series—a screen that promises infinite knowledge and connection, yet conceals behind it a void, a darkness that resists comprehension.
At the heart of each image is a central blackness, a void that refuses representation. Sight is pushed to the periphery. What we are invited to “see” is not what is there, but what has been occluded. This emptiness is not a lack but a portal—an opening onto the imperceivable. As Ramesh Balsekar writes, “A mirror can only reflect all things by virtue of the fact, that in itself it contains nothing and retains nothing.” Mirrors suggests that vision, when overwhelmed by stimuli, collapses into blindness. And in that blindness, another kind of perception—perhaps a deeper seeing—becomes possible.
There is a devotional austerity to this work, a meditation on the thresholds of perception and the limits of sensory engagement. Inspired by the historical use of the Claude glass—the black mirror used by artists to view and abstract landscapes—Mirrors becomes a contemporary device for seeing what lies beyond surface appearances. According to Arnaud Maillet, the black mirror parallels the emergence of the unconscious, plunging the eye into blindness in order to reconstitute sight itself. This suspension of clarity—the blink, the pause—is where consciousness is formed.
The series exists as both image and anti-image. A critique and an invocation. In dissolving the visible, Mirrors gestures toward the invisible, the enigmatic, and the sacred unknown. It is an invitation to step beyond the glut of appearances, into the stillness that holds them all.
