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 system of mirrors composes the repeated pattern of a chain-link fence, creating multiple lenses in the ICA's gallery. The mirror fragments force the viewer to look at a fragmented and disrupted version of themself. Reflections are embedded into the pattern's system to question how we are implicated in the system's narratives. Each piece reflects light, images, and color in different directions depending on your point of view.
The same pattern of mirrors is also re-composed in an outdoor installation on a chain-link fence that surrounds a garden of sweetgrass, planted the summer before in an empty lot, in which root systems act as phytoremediators which is a type of plant that reduces toxic effects of contaminants.
Inside the gallery is a work that takes harvested sweetgrass, along with fragments of garbage, and salvaged clothes that are combined into a rope. The rope circles into a braided rug that spirals and twists in the gallery for viewers to walk in a path around it.
Each piece encourages viewers to constantly reposition themselves and engage with the piece through walking.