Doubling Down

By William L. Fox
Director, Center for Art + Environment, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno

According to published surveys, you look in a mirror between 8 and 26 times a day. If you are a male and you shave, you spend 16.5 minutes on average in front of a mirror while shaving; if a woman, you may spend an average of 14.5 minutes applying makeup and adjusting your personal appearance in its presence. Artificial mirrors have been with us for at least 8,000 years, glass ones with metal backing for more than 2,000 years. Mirrors reverse the forward-to-backward axis, which is why we think they reverse left to right. No matter, we are so adept at the mirror effect that we manage not to slit accidentally one’s throat while shaving, or to put out an eye while applying eye shadow.

We picture mirrors in paintings and photographs, and clad entire skyscrapers in them, sometimes inadvertently cooking adjacent buildings as a result. We deploy them in periscopes and lasers, but also in optometrists’ and dentists’ offices, and carnival funhouses. Virtually every vehicle hosts at least one. As a result, it’s difficult to surprise us with a mirror, but the slender and elusive Invisible Barn by the architect studio stpmj that sits in a forest in the northern Sierra, and Doug Aitken’s full-size Mirage ranch house in the Swiss Alps above Gstaad are examples of contemporary artists putting mirrors on structures in hopes of helping encounter reality in unexpected ways.

Phillip K. Smith III’s temporary installation Lucid Stead is the most interesting of these interventions by several virtues. Smith was born and raised in the Mojave Desert, returning to his home terrain to practice architecture and make

art after earning BFA degrees at the Rhode Island School of Design. His early sculptures and installations used architecture as their inspiration, sometimes incorporating mirrors and lights with stacks of interleaved material, but Lucid Stead adopted an actual building for its armature. Using an abandoned “jackrabbit homestead” cabin (the name comes from the American desert hares that inhabit the land), Smith profoundly destabilized what you thought of a mirror.

One of the last homestead movements in America, the Bureau of Land Management’s Small Tract Act of 1938 provided people with up to five acres in the Mojave’s Morongo Basin for only a few dollars if you improved the property (most often by building a cabin of at least 400 square feet) within three years. It was an attempt to monetize what the government considered useless land, but veterans returning from WWII spurred a land rush and as late as 2004, 2,000 of these simple structures remained. Many were one-room bilateral tripartite cabins—four walls and a roof fronted by a door with a window on each side. It’s the most common face of a domicile in American architecture.

Smith wrapped mirrored bands around the house that alternated with the original slats of wood siding. The effect in the highly isotropic environment of the Mojave—where everything looks much the same in all directions—was that you thought you were looking through the house. It was difficult to remember that you were looking in a mirror, a bit as if the Invisible Man had taken off alternating strips of bandages and revealed not what was behind him, but behind you. The effect produced an affect that left you betwixt and between. The mirrored structures by stpmj and Aitken retained their visual integrity, despite open windows and doors through which you could see the landscape on the other side of the house. But the gestalt of Mirage as a house was so compromised by alternation of mirrored and un-mirrored planks that you had to concentrate to reassemble its condition as a house. You lost track of time, could literally get dizzy while performing this reverse prestidigitation, and in short experienced what you least needed in an isotropic space: disorientation. On the other hand, it was safer and more interesting than doing drugs.

Additionally, Smith took an historical building as his armature, which meant you found yourself moving back and forth in time, between the old weathered boards and the slick mirrored bands, between the Old West and the Post-Rural, between homesteading and art-going. The effect at night was, if not as disorienting, even more complicated. Smith used LEDs to turn the windows and doors into solid panels of blue, red, yellow, green, orange, or purple that slowly rotated through the palette. In between the boards and bands of mirrors white light leaked out, making visible the diagonal two-by-fours inside and holding up the walls. What by day looked like slices of a house hovering improbably over the desert by night became something both more solid but oddly eerie.

Smith’s work has been compared to that of the earlier masters of the Light and Space movement in Southern California during the 1960s and early ‘70s, artists such as James Turrell, Robert Irwin, and Larry Bell. The linkage is apt, their spare geometries and use of both natural and projected light tinkering with the permeable boundaries of cognition and reality. Manipulating materials to make the world at once strange and beautiful so that we can perceive more of it is the useful task of an artist. Rearranging what we think a mirror does in the Mojave—an environment so alien to us that we stage science fiction movies on it because there is no objective correlative to contradict the imagination—is to double down on the question of sight itself. If we think that what we see is what we believe, then Phil Smith has given us every chance to question that assumption.