MULTIPLE SELVES
Location
Studio
Year
2023
Dimensions
23” x 17” x 21”
Media
Ground and polished glass, adhesive
I make art to explore ideas and discover new experiences. Most of the art I make is interactive, which means that I often discover the full meaning of an artpiece only when other people experience it. For years I've been thinking about the self as a society of voices that we pull into a coherent personality on an ongoing basis that sometimes coheres beautifully and sometimes unravels.
I had been experimenting with glass spheres used for recent projects and sometimes I would hold one up to my eye and see the world inverted and distorted. Then I'd hold up two spheres next to each other. What would it feel like to be inside a mask made from hundreds of these spheres? What would I look like from the outside?
The experience is beautiful but also slightly terrifying. Inside the mask, the participant is surrounded by hundreds of glass spheres that function as fisheye lenses, each with a slightly different view outward. The viewer inside the mask see different aspects of the world depending upon which direction they look. They also see multiple reflections and the overlap of images from the different directions.
Onlookers outside the mask see through these lenses in the opposite direction, seeing different aspects of the person wearing the mask depending on the angle from which they look inward.






