| The shallow surface of a traditional mirror is made from applying a layer of reflective material – lead, tin, mercury, zinc – to glass. This magical invention, which art and literature has historically used to demark mainly female gazers as vain and fatuous, is far more complex than this one-dimensional reading suggests. A decorative mirror's promise may have magical 'mirror, mirror on the wall' connotations, but this status as the embodiment of superficiality masks a fascinating complexity. To unlock the secrets of the mirror involves succumbing to its visual allure, it is only then that the hypnotic repetitions and oppositions may just, to paraphrase Michael Bracewell, turn surface into depth, and reveal multiple layers of meaning.
On-screen a mirror is a useful prop, it can supply an unexpected angle, dynamize a dreary scene, allow us to imagine the inner thoughts of a character, or suggest an untrustworthy duplicity that wasn’t previously apparent. But it isn’t only mise-en-scène that is enlivened by a mirror, because as Nico promises in 'I’ll be Your Mirror (reflect what you are)', the stars we gaze at on our multifarious screens are effective mirrors living the lives we dream of. And if we stare into a reflective surface for long enough, a practice known as scrying, we may just see our future partner or like Snow White’s stepmother, receive communications from a spirit.
For On Reflection Cathy Lomax has screenprinted her paintings of mid-century actress Jennifer Jones onto various mirrored surfaces. Although little known today Jones was an Academy Award winner whose high-profile films were often adapted from literary works such as Madame Bovary. She was a pre-Method, method actor, whose committed performances centred on her mobile and emotive face. As she was rarely interviewed and did not write a memoir, the only reliable information we have about her is her vibrant on-screen image.
In On Reflection the depictions of Jones in her multifarious roles are overlaid, via their reflective supports, with the image of the viewer. In 'Eyes Wide Shut', Jones, as Mary, Ruby and Victoria, has her eyes closed on found hand mirrors. This refusal to confront our gaze might just be her only defence against voracious consumption. In 'We Were Strangers' Jones, in the guise of her many screen roles, is caught in, or escaping from a frame. In a reoccurring image Jones, as indiscrete American wife Mary Forbes, is Medusa-like, disembodied and open-mouthed, as she is reflected back and forth from the mirrors hung on the wooden staging. The scene is surveyed by 'The Woman Nobody Knows' a bank of coloured screenprints of Jones as Ruby Gentry, 'a hot-blooded swamp gal' from North Carolina, who gazes down through lowered lashes at her multiple reproductions (and us).
The mirrored artworks are accompanied by Tamar Jeffers McDonald’s wunderkammer-like vitrine of mirror-related artifacts and a curated selection of clips of mirrors in Hollywood film. A new ‘Mirrors’ themed issue of Lomax’s art fanzine Arty has been produced alongside the exhibition.
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