Homo Speculos | 2015

5 true mirrors in matt-black columns (38 x 38 x 168 cm, 38 x 38 x 162 cm, 38 x 38 x 138 cm, 38 x 38 x 128 cm, 38 x 38 x 118 cm) | Exhibited at Adam Aronson Gallery, Laumier Sculpture Park, St. Louis, Missouri

Five true mirrors show you as you are. Most mirrors offer illusions of ourselves. Giving us a picture of ourselves that is neither as we really are, nor as others see us. Instead, they present a reversed image, turning left into right. What we make of ourselves is usually an approximation. A ‘true mirror’, on the other hand, is a device made of a combination of two front silvered mirrors, placed at right angles to each other, that reverses the lateral reversion image produced by a normal mirror, to show us as we really are. Even a ‘true mirror’ is an illusion (a mirror image of the illusion in the normal mirror) albeit one which appears to be correct, or at least appears to correct the illusion of a normal mirror.

The popular 18th Century text ‘Fables of Florian’ offers an image of the idea of a Mirror of Truth: Simple Truth herself made bold To rove at large with glass in hand, Each in her mirror dar’d to trace,
Without a blush, his own true face. But crimes and vices stole in fast and soon those happy days were past. Then Truth, disgusted, to Heaven flew, And back to earth her mirror threw. Alas! ‘twas
broken in the fall, And scatter’d wide and lost to all.
 
This gives us an image of a broken truth, constantly in need of repair and assemblage. Homo Speculos, is a work that reflects on this condition. It places five ‘true mirror’ assemblages on five pedestals at different heights and angles, such that a person appearing in front of it, sees himself, or herself, broken, but re-assembled, and laterally un-reversed. What emerges is an assemblage of what humanity might like to think it is, in five ‘true mirrors’ that show us as we think we ought to be.