A Mirrored Image Is Always Reversed

Intimacy is a deep biological need manifesting not only in our relationships with others but also in the private space of our own minds. Becoming intimate with oneself involves escaping the notion of a fixed self and constructing meaning based instead on a
malleability of the self. This self is highly dynamic, allowing certain truths to exist over a
period of time yet also deconstructing the same truths.  

My body of work seeks to explore the mystery of such interactions with the self and the intimate (personal) constructions of meaning which follow.  By using mirrors as subject matter in my caffenol prints and as objects to hold my cyanotypes, I aim to make such interactions more fully realized in an embodied experience, one that brings up questions of conceptualizing about the self in all its complexity.

For me, the mirror is inherently an intimate object. It is designed to bring one closer to the self by reflecting the truth, but is in fact fundamentally flawed: there are no true reflections—a mirrored image is always reversed, for example—just as there is no fixed self. In the cyanotype Self Study with Hands, for example, I juxtapose a portrait with the viewer’s own face in order to unsettle the viewer’s expectations about perception. Not only is the subject’s face and hands visible but also the viewer’s reflection, both shifting due to movement within time and space. Thus I am able to illustrate the existence of an ever-changing self, one that is often affected by the gaze of others, coupled with the intimacy and intrigue of self-examination in a mirror.

                                                                                                              —Samantha J Metzner