Seeing your own reflection in the glass cover of an artwork, where are you inclined to look?
On a trip to Tate Britain, whilst observing other visitors, I was suddenly confronted by my own presence as I strolled past a mirror-based artwork. As my own gaze and corporeality were put on the same plane as the art itself, I began to question the role our viewership plays in constructing a gallery space. Using Helen Rees Leahy’s 2012 Museum Bodies: The Politics and Practices of Visiting and Viewing as a core text, I started researching the socially constructed norms of how people behave as gallery visitors.
The museum experience creates a duality of looking and being looked at. As we are observing objects and artworks, we tend to maintain a certain cadence and choreography, moving around the gallery according to spoken and unspoken institutional rules. Our viewership becomes a performance, and our gaze becomes internalised, as aware of our own physicality as of the artwork on display.
Using mirrors as a material to confront visitor self-perception, and experimenting with the language of institutional policies, my research explores the role of visible and invisible boundaries in the gallery space, and how these relate to our physical and emotional experiences of art works on display.
The museum experience creates a duality of looking and being looked at. As we are observing objects and artworks, we tend to maintain a certain cadence and choreography, moving around the gallery according to spoken and unspoken institutional rules. Our viewership becomes a performance, and our gaze becomes internalised, as aware of our own physicality as of the artwork on display.
Using mirrors as a material to confront visitor self-perception, and experimenting with the language of institutional policies, my research explores the role of visible and invisible boundaries in the gallery space, and how these relate to our physical and emotional experiences of art works on display.