One Way Mirror @ Sawtooth ARI, Launceston Tasmania + KH55, Leipzig Germany
One Way Mirror was a double installation conceived in collaboration with artist Alexander Jackson Wyatt. The work appropriates a fragmented vision of The Big Merino to examine the role of monuments in the creation of shared images and histories. In a darkened room in Launceston, a huge Rorschach-like image of The Ram’s head spills onto and around an ill-fitting armature, challenging legibility and leaving it’s own skeleton on the walls behind. This same object was simultaneously being duplicated in a foreign context – KH55 in Leipzig, Germany – and both opened on September 7, 2012. Conceptually, the work is a meditation on Australia’s own corrupted claims to sovereignty and in turn questions the German Nationalist archetype that saw so many of its own great monuments lost to a process of state-enforced forgetting. In formal terms though, One Way Mirror debates through repetition and difference the structure of images and how they are (de)constructed in space.
One Way Mirror was developed via blog, Skype and email and represents the culmination of 12 months of conversations between the artists, both of whom share an interest in the way space is constructed and how it is transformed by time. An accompanying catalog documents this conversation, which can be read as a linear narrative of process, or dived into at any point and followed in several directions at once.
Video documentation of the final work in its two locations will be available soon on the Video Archive.
