EXHIBITED WORKS
Tall Gallery, Warehouse 17, La Fuerza Compound
MARK JUSTINIANI
Phantom Limb
Oct. 6 to 27, 2011
Continuity of Presence
Phantom Limb, Mark Justiniani's latest one-man exhibition, examines the paradoxes between presence and absence in its use of installations and optical illusions.
The show features an entire series of “cube works,” created from sculptures, glass, mirrors and light. These mirror boxes are self-contained tableaus: holding captive various memories and narratives like moments frozen in time.
In Justiniani's new series, light becomes both medium and process: illuminating the boxed sculptures and creating multiple sequences by repeatedly reflecting their images across mirrored walls. It ricochets, splits and scatters inside the enclosed spaces, replicating images of the objects trapped inside and dissipating towards darkness. As the artist writes: we are looking at screens, veiled images of a foreground flipped and reproduced over and over again, mimics of an incomplete world.
Justianiani titles his show after the phenomenon of people having limbs physically severed yet retaining a sense of their physical presence—movement and pain, for instance—long after the actual parts are gone. The artist adds that mirror boxes have been used to help heal those suffering from “ghost pains” in their missing limbs—creating an illusion of the absent part and facilitating healing and closure in the process.
Strategically positioned, mirrors and light work together to construct multiple images, sequences, and spaces from the singular objects displayed inside. One sees lone figures and scenes endlessly repeated as they are reflected, visually perceptible yet physically intangible. Here, illusions go beyond appearances; they have the capacity to suggest and even be as potent as the thing replaced. Justiniani recalls the Katipuneros who reproduced wooden rifles to trick the Spanish forces into thinking that the former were indeed sufficiently armed, an instance where perception helped alter reality.
Some themes within the show delve into the social: symbols which denote larger realities once replicated. Others works reflect more on our perceptions of time and space: recognizing our propensity to “occupy moments in segments” and to “look through the gaps and intervals of our metered bits of consciousness.” Collectively weighed, they are, as the artist terms it, “historical phantoms,” similar to wounds which may be materially absent yet still alive in our memories and in the ways they continue to alter the course of the present.
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