Laura Mackin

From St. Paul’s deprecation of human perception as “through a glass, darkly,” to Charles Fourier’s claim, in true Gnostic fashion, that the universe was a mirror, and Jacques Lacan’s mirror as the site of primal alienation, the mirror is certainly a window fraught with all the anxiety of invisible flatness and infinite false depth.

The advent of electronic imaging offered a ready comparison to this cryptic oracle of a parallel world; the less certain we feel about our reality, the more we feel that the mirror watches us. In her project Davis, Laura Mackin has painstakingly cut out and aligned images reflected in the hundreds of mirrors proffered for sale on eBay by a single vendor, Davis, who always leans his/her wares against one particular tree for photographing. Through this process Mackin has assembled a panoramic photograph of an anonymous backyardlike outdoor area by puzzling these fragments together, in an inductive reversal of the modern fragmenting of time.

Her prints and artist book show the panorama as a Photoshop file at different levels of transparency—with an ethereal white background in the book, and a more sinister black background in the hanging prints. In the film Blade Runner there’s a scene in which Harrison Ford analyzes a digital photo, and gives voice commands to a computer. The machine zooms, with SLR-type shutter clicks, into a mirror. Though it is a seemingly still picture, the mirror image shifts in enough to render a shadowy figure identifiable. Similarly, Mackin’s photos reveal, in their seeming banality, uncanny elements—a storage shed, a gravestone—which, through the power lent by their subtle divination, quietly burn with secret menace.

—Bert Stabler