Mirror Milk︎︎︎
Satchel Projects Group ShowExhibition text by Hindley Wang
Apr.13-May.13, 2023
Satchel Projects is pleased to present “Mirror Milk,” a group exhibition featuring works by Lisa Beck, Melissa Brown, Nicole Eisenman, Cadence Giersbach, Valerie Hegarty, Julia Jacquette, Sawool Kim, Cyriaco Lopes, Paul Loughney, Fabian Marcaccio, Ali Miller, Gelah Penn, and Autumn Wallace, with text by Hindley Wang.
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How would you like to live in Looking-glass House, Kitty? I wonder if they’d give you milk in there? Perhaps Looking-glass milk isn’t good to drink—but oh, Kitty! Now we come to the passage. You can just see a little peep of the passage in Looking-glass House, if you leave the door of our drawing-room wide open: and it’s very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond. Oh, Kitty, how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking-glass House! I’m sure it’s got, oh! such beautiful things in it! Let’s pretend there’s a way of getting through into it, somehow, Kitty. Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through.
— Lewis Carroll, Through the looking glass and what Alice found there
Mirror Milk gets its inception from the story of Alice, as a ramification of an original curiosity and a perpetual desire for that which lies on the other side—and, inversely, the counter-force of denial and loss–a perpetual circuit. The show seeks to explore the mutual longing of one side for the other, the tantalizing impossibility and the wonder that drives us. The very phrase “Mirror Milk” contains a reflection, within itself, consisting first of “mirror,” the image, then “milk,” the substance.
Via the works on view, Mirror Milk refracts kaleidoscopic possibilities–of doubleness, perception, re-cognition, mutation, (a)symmetry, transference, pressure, rupture.
In Melissa Brown’s San Cristobal Crystal Ball, the doubling is refracted from the painting onto the title, in its unspoken redundancy, an elegant self-awareness and subconscious repetition. Reflected in an oval mirror, tree branches tenderly touch leaf-tips against a glowering sky. Lisa Beck initiates the opticality of the mirrored surface in a reflexive fixation – a painting looking over itself, in a perpendicular half-reflection. Cadence Giersbach resurrects the corporeality of the mirror, conjuring the life of the surface, both intruding upon and collapsing the distance between the beholder of vision and object of it. Mirror with Snakes reenacts the drama of perception, performing the tantalizing petrification of vision. In Ali Miller’s Grasp, 2022, an encounter between the two sides is rendered in a lush delirium of colors. The beginning of a search: the impulse to climb over the edge, to that other side, charged with fascination and frustrated obsession.
I wonder if they’d give you milk in there?
The uncanny renderings of the milk in the mirror, taken from its previously stable construct of the flat image, is now leaking, extending, in full physicality and materiality of this side.
Valerie Hegarty takes a vibrantly volatile approach, mobilizing the “life” from stasis. Her “still” life erupts from the confines of two-dimensionality, shedding skin and hurling pulp. Exerting and splashing outside the frame of the canvas, the exploded substance stops just short of the canvas edge. Life exudes, taking more than just optical shape, laying claim to the physical space. The corporeality of this side is animated before being internalized back into the surface plane in Julia Jaquette’s Pouring. The painting stages a depiction of Vermeer’s milkmaid pouring milk onto a mirrored surface. Repositioning the locality of life, this material staging of objects inside painting re-presents the painting as object, delineatingthe threshold of two sides, in fluidity. A symbolic and material transfer from one container to another, or to none. The milk is served, but consumption is unsettled. In the tondo Why Buy the Cow…, Autumn Wallace creates a double portal, the sculptural frame echoing the open mouth of a reclining figure within. A single, opaque drop of white liquid is on its descent into the orifice. White linear tracings hover on the surface of the painting, suspended on the same plane with the droplet, floating above the lush dark volumes of a body in all its abandon and wanton splendor.
A little peep of the passage
A double portal also appears in Sawool Kim’s Event Horizon #11. A block, a beginning. The double opening also suggests an enclosure. A delicate denial. What lies ahead? The question becomes an end in itself. Fabian Marcaccio nets his wormholes, penetrating the confines of plane and depth, tangible surface and imperceptible interiority. The dark funnels are braided with the entangled materiality, swirling in the psychological drama behind the foreground figures. Hanging on a thread. The surface becomes precarious, again.
As far as you can see
In Nicole Eisenman’s Untitled 2006, two dollops of opaque paint were deposited on the two slits for vision before getting pressed into the flat surface again. See-through, seeing through. The enmeshment of image and substance creates a residue, like tears: but what is it a residue of? A contact, a substance, or vision itself? Queering the surfaces of photograph/image, Cyriaco Lopes turns crash into embrace, mutating the heterogeneous repulse between the medium of photography and ink into desire. From antiquity to the immediate, the journey is trailed in the aperture.
How nice it would be
Paul Loughney’s A Comparison Game charts a field of reflection in deluge, disclosing the deception of the symmetrical “double”. The two hands are bent and reiterated in their chirality, superposed in shadows and camouflages. A tell tale of the impossibility of the mirror image, and the magnetic/dynamic attraction toward the objet petit a. For Gelah Penn, the “stuff” is the image, and the “image” is the stuff, the impossibility of translation is the jest of the game. The images of Penn’s installation and the added material onto the physical pictures/photos create a mimetic tension, suspending the integral difference with its contingent similitude. A space in between, otherwise.
Mirror Milk is stream of consciousness, refracted beams of light, deceiving visions and alternative spaces, found expressions and fractured materials, dried emotions and liquified symbols. Weaving through the unseen and the blatantly obvious, the imperceptible and the untouchable, the placid and the aroused, the transparent and the hallucinatory, the works reflect and deflect off one another. Questioning our senses as they make sense, the resulting enigma makes it clear that the tensions are not pulled from any opposites, and desires are from all directions.
While they dodge, flee, extend, embrace and repulse, drip and dry, the works in this show present a sensorium, of impulse, best intentions, wishful thinking, accidents, appearances, transgressions, intrusion and withdrawal, lingergings and longings.
-Hindley Wang