What if a mirror wasn’t interested in telling you the truth?
That question lies at the heart of Reflection: Between Surface and Self, a new exhibition opening this Friday, July 17, at Lilienthal Gallery. Featuring work by Jimmy O’Neal and Martin C. Herbst, the exhibition explores what happens when mirrors intentionally deceive, bending and refracting both the artwork and the viewer.
I stopped by yesterday to preview the exhibition and chat with Gallery Director Kelly Ferguson. The show began making its point before our conversation even started, as I struggled to disentangle my own reflection from the art I was attempting to photograph.
“Both artists are really interested in bringing the viewer into the artwork,” said Ferguson. “When you think of a mirror, it’s reflecting your own image back. In these works, whatever color your shirt is, your face, the light in the room—it’s all now inextricably part of the piece.”
Both the artists are painters, but unlike traditional paintings, these works refuse to remain static. As visitors shift their position, the artworks shift with them, all while playing off other art and objects in their environs. Reflections ripple across crumpled aluminum. Metallic paint catches and redirects light. Images appear, disappear and reassemble from different angles.
“It’s extremely personal,” Ferguson said. “What you see depends on where you’re standing.”
O’Neal, a classically trained painter based in South Carolina, developed his own reflective paint—a medium that behaves like a mirror without actually being painted onto one. His works balance recognizable forms with sweeping abstraction as shifting reflections reveal new figures and meanings over time.
“He’s trying to simplify, simplify, simplify,” Ferguson said. “Rather than telling you exactly what you’re looking at, he’s focusing on the energy of the moment.”
That openness leads to wildly different interpretations. In a single work, one viewer may see an angel while another perceives a demon. “The interpretation becomes a reflection of the viewer,” Ferguson said.
Mirrors, juxtaposed with organic primordial-looking forms that evoke fossils and the logarithmic spiral of a nautilus shell, become something simultaneously ancient and futuristic.
Herbst, an Austrian artist, approaches reflection through another route. His portraits emerge from highly polished aluminum, where the painted image often exists more vividly in its distorted reflection than on the surface itself. As viewers walk past, the faces seem almost animated, stretching and reforming with every step.
Anytime I write about art, I’m keenly aware of how much slips through the cracks between the experience and the words and visual facsimiles meant to capture it. Ferguson quotes Roland Barthes, who described photos as “a motionless image” that is “anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.” Reflective works, by contrast, remain alive. She points to philosopher Walter Benjamin’s concept of an artwork’s “aura,” the idea that something essential exists only in the physical presence of the object itself. These mirrors amplify that effect, resisting reduction.
The experience is a quiet counterpoint to an age dominated by screens. “It’s almost a protest against just scrolling through images online,” Ferguson said. “These pieces ask you to be with them.”
The exhibition’s title hints at that dual invitation. On one level, viewers encounter literal reflections of themselves. On another, they’re encouraged to consider more metaphorical forms of reflection: perception, identity, memory and the stories we project onto ambiguous images.
Ferguson notes that mirrors have long occupied a place in mythology and literature as portals, mystical objects and symbols of interior life. I think of Alice stepping through the looking glass into an alternative world, and the Greek myth of Narcissus transfixed by his own reflection.
Whether visitors come away contemplating philosophy or simply marveling at the technical craftsmanship, Ferguson hopes they’ll give the work time.
“The longer you look,” she said, “the more you see.”
Exhibition Opening
23 Emory Pl.
July 17 from 5 – 8 pm
Gallery Talk @ 6:30 pm
Attire: Silver
RSVP to Opening
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