You Never Know How You Look Through Other People’s Eyes ICA MECA 2018
You will Never Know How You Look Through Other People’s Eyes
MECA, INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, Portland, ME
Curated by Scott Weiner
Essay by Mary Mattingly
Artists include Sonia Almeida, Paul S. Briggs, Caleb Charland, Ricardo DeLima, Sean Downey, Sean Fader, N. Sean Glover, Jaclyn Jacunski, AJ Liberto, Lilly McElroy, and Eric Petitti.
A chain-link fence pattern built entirely from mirror fragments turns the ICA's gallery into a field of fractured looking. The structure is familiar, a boundary, a threshold, a marker of who belongs where, but here it reflects the viewer at themselves in pieces, implicating the body in the very system it observes. There is no neutral vantage point. Light, image, and position shift with every step, making the act of looking inseparable from the question of where you stand.
The same mirror pattern extends outdoors, mounted on a chain-link fence that encloses a garden of sweetgrass, planted months earlier in a vacant lot. Below ground, the sweetgrass roots are doing slow, invisible work of phytoremediation, drawing toxins out of contaminated soil. The installation brings these two acts of transformation together: the mirror that disrupts our perception, and the plant that quietly repairs what has been poisoned.
Inside, harvested sweetgrass is braided together with fragments of garbage and salvaged clothing into a rope of materials of labor, discard, and survival wound into one another. The rope coils across the gallery floor in a spiral, part rug, part path, part record. Viewers move around it and through it, their bodies tracing the same logic of accumulation and transformation that runs through the whole body of work.
Across all three works, the body is the instrument. To see is to move, to be implicated, to take a position, and to understand that position is never fixed