The Claude Mirror

This series of collaborative portraits evolve in a number of sessions during which both the artist and the model contribute to the making of an image. The digital screen acts much like the Claude Mirror, an 18th century invention with the slightly convex surface of the mirror, which widens the background view while allowing foreground to come into focus. The digital device held by the model acts like a mirror, framing the model and the scene. In a make-shift studio, the author’s camera frames another screen. The camera is connected to a laptop with an image capture software, which then takes a shot. The exposure happens through the mediation of multiple cameras and digital screens. The physical distance is diminished by the act of communication. The outcomes are portraits, stretched both by the very genre of portrait and the digital bandwidth which enables them. In the times of ever-increasing digital communication the physical attributes of images are considered in terms of digital pixels, their surfaces flattened even further. Digital image testifies about the digital distance, compressed within a new mode of perception.

The participating artists include: Hanita Schwartz, Maša Seničić, Mary Addison Hackett, Maria Finn, Lisa Tuttle, Melisa Potter, Mica Scalin, Rebecca Cummins, Hannah Leah Israel, Mica Scalin, Andri Alexandrou, Vadis Turner, Ksenija Turčić, and growing.

Hanita Schwartz

Hanita Schwartz is a Seattle based artist whose work patiently explores how revisionism can be used to reinterpret traditional narratives surrounding the patriarchal canon of Western Art.

Maša Seničić

is a writer with an interdisciplinary approach to poetic spaces and spaces of poetry.

Mary Addison Hackett

Mary Addison Hackett is an artist whose practice spans painting, photography, video, and other time-based projects as a means of examining everyday life.

Maria Finn

Maria Finn is a Swedish Artist that lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark and significant for her practice is an inter-medial approach that investigates memory, time and landscape.

Lisa Tuttle

Lisa Tuttle is an Atlanta-based artist who mixes digital and hand-drawn processes along with historical and fictional narratives.

Melisa Potter

develops research, documentary and advocacy projects with ethnographers and intangible heritage experts to protect, interpret and archive endangered women’s handicrafts and social customs.

Mica Scalin

My life is my art. Make, share, reflect, repeat. 

Rebecca Cummins

In the Quarantine series, Seattle based artist Rebecca Cummins draws in her backyard, co-opting modest objects as sundial gnomons.

Hannah Israel

Hannah Israel reflects on information as a form of abstraction. The nature of her work maps the relationships of our existence by illustrating how fragile time can be and how predictable our experiences can be based on the temperament of the world around us. 

Andri Alexandrou 

Andri Alexandrou is a software engineer and sometimes-artist living in Athens, Greece.

Vadis Turner

Vadis Turner transforms feminist and domestic materials into abstract paintings and sculptures. 

Ksenija Turčić

Ksenija Turčić is a an artist working mainly in extended painting, focusing on issues of alienation and individual visibility in a post-social context of eastern Europe.