"I See You" is a performance which explores the impact of perception within human relationships using a drawing device I call “The Two-Way Mirror". "The Two-Way-Mirror interprets visually the idea that the world as we know it is a construct of each of our own brains, in the sense that the entirety of our perception arises only in our mind, and not actually in the world that might exist without us in it.

 

My work encourages you, as a viewer, to explore this idea by placing a glass screen - representing your mind - between you and the world (in this case the person sitting across from you), and inviting you to draw or trace what you see through that glass. As you draw, your marks subjectively interpret the world, but also come to block out the world as the glass fills with your interpretive image.

 

In its most evolved form, the two-way mirror encourages both you and a partner—your lover, a parent, your enemy if you can get them to sit with you! —to paint each others’ images on opposite sides of the glass simultaneously. You begin the experiment as perhaps you began your relationship, as newcomers to each other with views of each other unshaped by desire or experience. As you add marks—as you begin to internalize your experience of each other—your marks and theirs begin to interact in the drawing, to complement or compete with each other, but also to obscure the actual person on the other side, painting you in front of you. Eventually their reality might become completely overwhelmed by your perception. The final result—which for both of you is simultaneously your co-created child and your two-headed monster—captures and mates together your perceptions of each other, and becomes an artistic externalization—a symbol or a sign—of your relationship with that person.

 

I See You is one of the Two-Way Mirror Projects.