MIRROR STAGE

The important thing about Mirror Stage is not that its source comes from pre-AIDS gay pornography. The important thing is that it is remarkably economical. No foreign imagery is added, as in traditional collage. The image is forced to cannibalize itself. Every intervention comes from the image’s own material. That makes the work feel almost biological—as though the body were growing another version of itself from within. The image becomes both donor and recipient, both top and bottom, basically vers.

‘Mirror Stage’ is the title because the work isn’t actually about reflection. The reflection fails. The image refuses to coincide with itself. Recognition is interrupted by repetition. The figure doesn’t encounter himself; he encounters another version generated from the same source. The self is produced through difference rather than identity.

The hole here is not simply an absence. It becomes a hinge between two identical photographs. The viewer is constantly aware of two originals occupying the same space. The hole functions less as emptiness than as a passage through which one version of the image enters another. It’s almost topological. The photograph develops an inside.