According to psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the ego takes form during the “mirror stage” of early-childhood development, through identification with one’s own reflection. This moment of recognition entails an experience of alienation, as the “other” is conflated with the recognizable “I,” undermining and fragmenting one’s cohesive sense of self. For her solo exhibition “I’m Not Coming Back Here,” Diamond Stingily aggravated the conditions necessitating this behavioral characteristic, using the symbolic object of the mirror as a tangible surface to be engaged with via silk-screen printing, rather than as merely a looking glass. Continuing the development of a sculptural vernacular based on the appropriation of household objects—particularly those, such as doors, fences, and gates, that serve as literal and spiritual thresholds or boundaries, Stingily’s mirrors open a space for reflection on the theme of the psychology of memory as it pertains to and is contained by inanimate objects.
Located in a former apartment in a canalside Altbau in Berlin, the exhibition space at Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi is less a white cube than an emptied, renovated family home, still bearing traces of its prior function, such as doorbells, marble mantels, built-in cabinets, and a bay of seats where a table likely once stood. These domestic features were complemented, but ultimately overshadowed, by Stingily’s fourteen new assisted readymades, in which mirrors functioned as picture frames for found and personal images of homes and personal effects that had been printed on them in either monochromatic ultramarine or oxblood ink. The printed images had to be closely scrutinized in order to distinguish them from the mirrored planes, contributing to a tandem viewing experience that included the beholder’s own reflection and that of their surroundings.
At each corner of a wood-paneled former drawing room, four six-and-a-half-foot-tall unframed mirrors were surreptitiously hung. Containing close-up and cropped images that appeared nearly abstract, these pieces became more identifiable through their titles—Apple Tree, Byron’s Closet, Pearl’s Cross, and Pearl’s Kitchen (all works 2023)—which began to suggest something of the artist’s relationship with the objects and locations shown in the images while neglecting to reveal entirely the logic of the selection. The gallery’s main room—the grand former reception or living room—contained the vast unframed mirror Stairway II, which peers upward at a carpeted flight of stairs, as well as Side of House, the largest of the works at nearly seven feet by four feet, in a gilded and carved frame that shows the white, paneled western facade of a two-story home, and Garage II, in which an austere view of a nondescript indoor parking garage is offset by the obnoxiously elaborate gilded frame containing it.
Basement, Dudley Beauty College, Front of House, and Garage I lined the walls of the long narrow corridor connecting the main room with a smaller one at the back of the apartment, putting viewers perhaps uncomfortably close to their own reflections even while making the details of the printed image more perspicuous. Likewise, in the final room, a former bedroom perhaps, the installation of three sleek full-length mirrors, the triptych Living Room, Ma’s Room II, and Children’s Room II, directly opposite the gilded Back of House, replete with flecks of mirror rot, problematized the act of viewing by creating an infinite regress of reflections. The elegiac presentation Stingily devised upset the erotics of observation. The works’ simultaneous inhibition and encouragement of looking yielded uncertainty as to their subjects, seeming to allow glimpses of the artist’s memories but finally denying access to them.
