Artist: Dylan Spaysky
Exhibition title: Mirrors
Venue: Tops Gallery, Memphis, US
Date: January 6 – March 14 2024
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Tops Gallery
Note: List of works is available here
“A mirror is a wave reflector. Light consists of waves, and when light waves reflect from the flat surface of a mirror, those waves retain the same degree of curvature and vergence, in an equal yet opposite direction, as the original waves. This allows the waves to form an image when they are focused through a lens, just as if the waves had originated from the direction of the mirror.” —Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror)
In Mirrors, a presentation of seven wall sculptures (with a scattering of heat fan lamps on the floor of the gallery), Dylan Spaysky’s simple holographic manipulations of reflection, transparency, and light turn into a public intro-spectacle on view at Tops Gallery’s Madison Avenue Park location. The selection of work from the past several years tracks a development in the series: each object uses commonly accessible and readily available materials (nuts, bolts, picture frames, extension cords, and other items within arm’s reach) to create a hallucinatory effect of reflective light. The works are illusionary yet fully exposed by the sculpture’s construction: night lights hanging between mirror and glass. In more recent works, however, Spaysky has added a new layer with the application of one-way mirror film whose compositional elements reference famous Impressionist artworks—paintings made by a group of artists who are historically known for addressing qualities of light (and its impression on our visual intake) with (oftentimes) quotidian subject matter (haystacks, boats, fruit bowls, churches, etc.) or in decidedly leisure-class zones (e.g. ballets, country estates, etc.). Within the context of this unique space—a gallery vitrine underneath a park in an alleyway in downtown Memphis—the works are seen through a third pane that compounds the reflective transparency and further implicates the viewer. How do mirrors function in a public space? Catching a glimpse of oneself in the mirrored
columns between floors of a mall while riding the escalator upstairs. Glancing up while washing one’s hands in a public restroom. Walking past and seeing one’s reflection in a glass storefront. Mirrors invokes this question and extend art’s investigation into the qualities (and magic) of light and vision: seeing beyond and beneath the surface, seeing oneself in the mirror and diving into more complicated, hard-to-distinguish planes.
The exhibition is organized by Tops Gallery in collaboration with Good Weather.
Dylan Spaysky (b. 1981 Pontiac, Michigan) currently lives and works in Detroit. He earned his BFA from the College for Creative Studies in 2007. Solo and two-person exhibitions include Good Weather (North Little Rock and Chicago), What Pipeline (Detroit), CUE Art Foundation (New York), Andrew Kreps (New York) (with Mary Ann Aitken), Clifton Benevento (New York), Popps Packing (Detroit), and Cleopatra’s (Brooklyn). He has participated in group exhibitions at Hannah Hoffman (Los Angeles), AWHRHWAR (LosAngeles), Center Galleries (Detroit), What Pipeline (Detroit), Good Weather (Chicago), S.O.C. Satoko Oe Contemporary (Tokyo), Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, NGBK (Berlin), Susanne Hilberry Gallery (Ferndale, Michigan), and with Good Weather at NADA Miami, among others. He has red hair. He was co-director of Cave (Detroit) from 2010 to 2016 and is owner/ director at Spaysky Fine Art Gallery llc (Detroit).
