Michael Branca - Fine Art
Which is Fairest?

Mirrors Compete for your Attention at Three Fish

by Jenna Russell

Portland Phoenix

December 12, 2002

Everybody has a favorite mirror, where the light falls just right, the flaws fade to the background, and the face gazing back from the glass looks nearly as elegant/edgy/mysterious/kissable/young as last night’s dream.

3 Fish Gallery has 28 mirrors on display this month, and even the devoted narcissist will find more in them than self-reflection. Fix your hair and makeup, then let your eyes wander to the wood, clay, and metal of the objects themselves: some beautiful, some funny, some disturbing. Artist Ron Spinella, who runs 3 Fish with his wife, Christine, asked seven of his friends — “people who don’t normally do mirrors” — to take on the assignment. The results are richly varied, and engaging in ways that have nothing to do with vanity or self-absorption.

The Spinellas collaborate as 3 Fish Guild, and their mirrors, among the most dazzling here, turn natural materials into masterpieces of precision. Ridged, gray tree bark neatly frames one mirror, with squares of soft, golden leather set diagonally, like tawny diamonds, in the frame’s four corners. The textures of the wood and hide, stark in their contrast, seem more real and living than the mirror’s flat reflection. Another mirror, “Real Gold Fish,” is decadent, with bodacious, cast plaster goldfish swirling at its corners, the whole thing sleekly layered with glossy, metallic-yellow gold leaf. It’s easy, in the faux solar glare, not to notice your pale, washed-out face in the mirror.

If these pieces pull the viewer’s attention away from herself, others are more blatant in foiling the instrument’s purpose, inserting actual barriers between the glass and its would-be observer. Michael Branca’s “Vanity Cage” hides the mirror behind a burnt, scarred catalytic converter, a castoff car part with rows of small holes punched through it. The mirror’s frivolous purpose is blocked by a rougher function; up close, a reflected face is broken up, chopped into pixels just big enough to isolate an eyeball. It’s disconcerting, like peering through a cage, or at a masked Hannibal Lecter. You can see that someone’s in there — you just can’t be sure who it is.

In Gretchen Duane’s “Odin,” paint obstructs the mirror view. A Viking warrior on horseback, running with wolves in a snowstorm, is depicted with white, lacy delicacy on the mirror’s surface, so looking into the wood-framed glass is like gazing through a winter window etched with frost. The viewer’s focus shifts dizzily back and forth, from her own face, deeply submerged, back up to the illustration on the surface.

Next to the storybook charm of Duane’s painted mirror, Ernest Paterno’s “Mirror I” is startling, a prop from a sadomasochistic disco. The brushed aluminum frame is glittery silver, and sharp black glass spikes protrude at top and bottom. Like overgrown thorns or devil’s horns, the glass points curl toward the mirror, deftly piercing a reflected eye or lip. The self-loathing observer may feel a disturbing little thrill of satisfaction.

These are not everyday mirrors, to be sure, but our everyday lives are studded with plainer versions: in our bathrooms, in our cars, in our handbags, on our ceilings. In life, as in the show at 3 Fish, it’s hard to turn around without glimpsing one’s own face. It’s an intriguing contradiction, then, that mirrors retain an aura of mystery, a fairy-tale quality that breeds both fear and fascination. Lewis Carroll’s Alice discovered another world by passing through a mirror, and in the story of Snow White, the magic mirror speaks the truth to the evil queen. Artist Megan Lovett plays with these childhood fictions, placing her mirrors in the paws of ceramic cat-women, voluptuous gray and orange figures wearing tiny peaked crowns and pearl necklaces. Fanciful and fancy, they seem the perfect characters to bear, so gracefully, the mirror’s burden of vanity.

There’s a small alcove at the back of the gallery, just past the panel of light switches, that looks like a storage cubbyhole, and is easy to miss. Duck in here to see one of the show’s funniest and most suggestive mirrors, also by Gretchen Duane. Entitled “Vanity Mirror,” it’s a mirror covered, completely, by a black velvet drape, with a small handwritten tag left dangling. “Warning: Use with extreme care,” the note reads. “Keep covered when not in use.” Silly as it sounds, there’s an inevitable instant of hesitation, a twinge of carnival-funhouse anxiety. God forbid we should look and see the future — or worse, the naked truth about ourselves. But go ahead, lift the velvet curtain. The impulse is irresistible, and like they say, the truth can’t hurt you.