Mirror Effect
at The Box

Liz Craft, Magic Box (detail) (2011). Mixed media. Image courtesy of the artist and The Box, LA.

It’s said that mirrors reveal the truth, especially truths we’d rather not see. In Mirror Effect, a group show on view at The Box, the body is distorted, dismembered, and then laid bare by its reflection.

Keith Farquhar’s inkjet-on-cardboard cutout, Large Purple Male (2015), greets the viewer upon entering the gallery. Iridescent paint augments the flat work’s dimensional illusionism. Elsewhere this mirror effect becomes a meditation on the psychical residue of physical traces. Kate Costello’s dense and oversized cement legs are a counterpoint to Janine Antoni’s to compose (2014), which is a ghostly and fragile polyurethane resin cast of a leg, its skeletal structure, and a tree trunk support like a fragment of Roman marble. In Magic Box (2011), Liz Craft reproduces the stage magician’s trick—sawing a woman in half—by dismembering a carnivalesque mannequin, like a still from Suspiria.

Craft and Costello, the show’s organizers, describe it as “a run of reverberations and echoes” on the body. The show’s works ricochet between the colorfully comic and the darkly abject, indicative of the often-fraught relationship we have with own bodies. As the lens through which we see ourselves, the mirror is a distorting glass, which reveals our doubts, desires, and self-perceptions. The works in Mirror Effect thus invite a deeper look to the mind that plays beneath the skin.

Mirror Effect runs May 23–June 20, 2015 at The Box (805 Traction Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90013).

Evan Moffitt is a writer and native resident of Los Angeles. He is the former editor-in-chief of the Hammer Museum’s annual journal, Graphite, and is a current editorial assistant and contributor to Paris LA magazine.

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