Mukherjee’s installation is a fiberglass head, made by rotating in a 3D printer his own profile horizontally 360 degrees. The translucent fiberglass is lit from within. The light is reflected and refracted in many pieces of irregularly broken mirrors affixed to all five surfaces of the proxy gallery. The idea harkens distantly to the 1915 perceptual experiment by Edgar Rubin, the face/vase illusion, where the shapes of two identical profiles facing each other form the shape of a vase in the negative space between them. The concept became very important in gestalt psychology, showing how the human brain organizes information about figure and ground.

But here we don't have two profiles. Rather, we have one profile extruded in a circular way so that the head, Janus-like, appears to be facing both right and left, without a frontal view of the face. The illuminating/illuminated head is enclosed or imprisoned in the proxy Gallery emitting and receiving its own light. This is a phantasmagoria of selfhood, the head “looking” in all directions at once, producing light like a regular lamp, but also illuminated by the mirrors. This reflection and fragmentation does not appear to telegraph any kind of depth or authenticity; rather, it points to the limits of vision in knowing someone, in the sense that the viewer cannot see a face, or an expression, and the head itself has become a symmetrical form, like a portrait spinning so rapidly that it appears to stand still. This spinning and scanning, not unlike the radar panopticons on top of Waymos, brings to mind the ideas of surveillance and hypervigilance, constantly being observed and observing, that bounce from the viewer to the sculpture to the mirrors and back.

Because of the way multi-directional perceptions are processed simultaneously, we can say that this is as good an approximation of a non- monolithic identity as any.

For more information visit Proxy Gallery online here.

For past Proxy Gallery shows at Beyond Baroque click here.