Mirror mirror on the wall...
by Kevin Freitas
Isabel Almeida lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.
One piece in a series of hand-blown glass works by Isabel that she then mirrored on the inside of the bulb like form with a liquid solution that coated the glass and made it reflective. She then adhered the form onto a flat 12" square mirror and hung the whole piece on the wall about waist high. She would alternate the cast pieces with "blank" flat mirrors that ran the whole circumference of the gallery walls. The resulting effect was nothing less than spectacular.
More images can be viewed here.
Comments
The making of intrinsically unphotographable objects is a worthy endeavor. The object above is beautiful in its resistance to sight.
Most beautiful of all, perhaps, would be a tabletop black hole. How many ways can an object express its presence visually yet be unseeable?
Posted by: RG | février 28, 2007 11:10 AM
Richard, I've added a link to some more images of these glass works installed in the gallery in Brussels, in Isabel's studio and some stalagmite looking pieces on the floor in a museum in Charleroi. Isabel I believe would have preferred to have a better "photo" of these pieces, to the point where she had a professional photographer come in and virtually "block" out all the reflections occurring naturally with a series of screens and filters. Obviously, it undermines the whole purpose of these pieces.
I wish you could have felt what it was like walking into the gallery; she even covered up two small doorways leading into a smaller space in back and the courtyard, with large 4' x 8' reflective panels. The whole effect was probably as close as you could get to your tabletop black hole idea, as everything seemed to disappear and fragment into a million different pieces. And that you couldn't see your face nor your whole body for that matter, made for a bizarre and somewhat unfulfilled narcissistic experience.
Posted by: Kevin Freitas | février 28, 2007 12:57 PM