Doubling

Doubling acts as a visual biography of self-identity. The image is derived from a past performance which documents my sister submerged in our childhood community pool. Inspired by the ethereal quality of Bill Viola’s video art and John Everett Millais’ painting Ophelia, the large-scale oil painting portrays idioms of youth that melt away in the doubled image. Mirrors help children develop a sense of self-identity and through mirrors, people recognize and recreate themselves. There is an intimate vulnerability in the act of looking at one’s own reflection because the mirror is key in the construction of ego. Through the doubling of the body there is a doubling of identity and reality; the reflected image appears in a different time. The painting explores Jacques Lacan’s philosophy on mirrors in the composition, documented performance, and illusion of reality in the painting as a two-dimensional object.