Introduction
by Jon Tjhia
Photo: Jon Tjhia
A surface polished clean, a still pool of darkening water, a dyad of glass and metal; mirrors are image-makers. Light workers and multipliers.
Across these eight commissions, light passes from point to point, beams splitting into wedges or converging on a spot until it burns. Thoughts break into conversations. A parent’s face—lined with hope or shame—is multiplied down generations or sent back up the line. Some strain to apprehend themselves while others spawn infinite duplicates. Spirits fall out of this world, faces pressed to the back of the glass. Shadows play off the walls; action falls into counteraction.
Crucially, mirrors don’t simply reproduce what’s there; they are constitutive. So too are the relations at play within this collection—relations between artist-collaborators, their vastly different positions and responses, and the currents of language, sight, commerce and time.
The artists here carry the question of mirroring through myriad forms and directions. In essays, poetry, videos, drawings and correspondence, they contend with refractions of truth and desire. They address conflicts of choice, inherited struggle, intimacy and recursion, yet are never far from the warmth (and trouble) of other bodies. Some edits (another mirror-relation) took place during walks around lakes and rivers, or in shifts between inverted time zones. I don’t think it’s coincidental how many of these projects, directly or otherwise, are staged intergenerationally: lineage is a mirror of its own.
This ecstatic multiplicity of art and writing is special, and I invite you to take your time with it, to return to it. And while you’re here, why not pick up a souvenir? At whatever your viewing distance, I hope these works divert your eye, show you around corners and complicate your electricity as they have for me. Remember: a replicate is a reply. 🪞
Audio versions of works in this collection are available, with more to be published in coming days.
Jon Tjhia (Naarm) is an artist, writer and editor working through radio and podcast, literature, installation, photomedia, music and digital publishing. His recent work is published by Un Magazine, Institute of Modern Art, Liminal, Avantwhatever, Liquid Architecture, WFMU and the ABC. He’s a member of the Manus Recording Project Collective, and a co-founder of Paper Radio and the Australian Audio Guide.
Jon lives as an uninvited guest on the traditional lands of the Wurundjeri-willam clan of the Eastern Kulin Nations, and acknowledges the sovereignty of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and their ongoing resistance to the invasion, dispossession and colonisation of their lands, waters and cultures.