Mirror Mirror: Then and Now

05-01-2010〜07-16-2010

At Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art

In the 1960s, mirrors began to be used by artists across a spectrum of international movements including pop, kinetic, minimal and conceptual art. Mirror surfaces reflect both the environment and the viewer, ‘like a visual pun on representation’, as Ian Burn observed. Not just a looking glass, mirrors index the instability of perception, while inviting a viewer to participate in the purported endgame of late modernism.

Mirror Mirror, curated by Dr Ann Stephen, presents classic mirror pieces from the 1960s and early 1970s by major artists Robert Smithson, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Art & Language, Ian Burn, Joan Jonas, Robert Rauschenberg, Yoko Ono, Meret Oppenheim, Richard Hamilton and Shusaku Arakawa. Alongside them are works by contemporary Australian artists – Robyn Backen, Christian Capurro, Peter Cripps, Mikala Dwyer, Alex Gawronski, Callum Morton, Eugenia Raskopoulos, Jacky Redgate and Robert Pulie – that make all kinds of interconnections and reverberations with the art of the 1960s.

(quote from Samstag Museum)