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Artspace, before the installation of Mirror Room. photograph Margaret Roberts
Mirror Room, March 2002.
Artspace,Sydney.
"Artspace was made ten years ago in the ground floor of the Gunnery with sections of white-cube wall conventionally used to create the indeterminate space suitable for art. White-cube art-walls are designed for their blankness, easily able to slide away in the presence of the positive art object or image. Mirror Room is intended to acknowledge their presence by incorporating them, and the conventions they represent, into the installation, through the construction of walls within gallery 1. The position and shape of this wall - construction is determined by the length and position of the gallery walls. As a mirror image seems to look back at what it reflects, the wall - construction may also be seen as a reflection of a kind, turning around to address where it came from.
The two sets of walls (the wall - construction and the gallery walls) hide spaces behind them - narrow spaces between the back of the white gallery walls and the Gunnery brick, and the bigger space inside the constructed - wall enclosure. In between, they create a varying space. This is the space of viewers, who bring in the outside world, who carry the conventions around with them, and who, though normally as 'invisible' in a gallery as any gallery wall, are the main positive presence in the room."
MORE MIRROR ROOM : see images by Sue Blackbirn and Ian Hobbes