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DANZ QUARTERLY Issue No 12
No 12 – July, August September 2008
Mirror Me
MIC Toi Rerehiko, Karangahape Road, Auckland
28 March – 3 May 2008
Reviewed by Jack Gray
‘Mirror Me’ was an interactive exhibition by Shona McCullagh, Michael Hodgson and John Gibson, utilising computer generated software installations that provided an interface with the viewer's projected/live body.
Presented in a series of rooms at the MIC Toi Rerehiko, I found the exhibition to be a surreal and lonesome experience. No gallery attendants or viewers around, with a playground of the imagination lurking ominously and expectantly within.
The first room had an inactive LCD screen. Leaving that, I went into a smaller room screening 'Mondo Nuovo'. A short film featuring a mirrored effect which split the screen down the middle, from whence clutches of fists, arms, bursting legs, dismembered torsos, floating fingers all appeared in fits of choreographic musicality. Perhaps first forms of life, gestating, mutating, devouring and spawning anew?
Next door, a main exhibition space cloaked in black had different interactive displays. One wall had cut out shapes I could look through. Waving my hands created plasmic splashes of colour on a screen in front. Another room was saturated with flashing neon lights that glittered off broken shards of mirror. Around the corner, a live-streamed projection of the traffic outside zipped across the wall. I found another installation that projected my own mirror image on the wall. I loved the chance to play in this private space, lying on the floor and taking PXT's of my sports shoes mirrored on the wall. There was also an installation of a pair of eyeglasses propped up with a projection that was not working at the time.
My first impression was of a lost, uninhabited world devoid of people and contact. It felt like a projection of a theatrical stage, where technology stood in its place and usurped the need for live performers.
Returning later to re-view, I found two of the installations were now functioning. The LCD screen showed my moving image as a halo of light, the eyeglasses had projections of dancers on each frame. There was also another viewer. I took great delight in telling him of the different things you could do in the exhibition and felt like an unofficial gallery attendant!
I enjoyed the inter-activeness much more the second time, realising the beauty of ‘Mirror Me’ was about the journey each person takes and our perspective based on where we stand, what we do and what we each see.
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