MORE ABOUT MYLAR ABSTRACTS

Shot of Mylar mirror on its frame. I shot some of Mylar Abstracts and the Blue Prince using it

By 1997 I was growing tired of searching for models and I’d begun to make my first pure abstractions. In the process without realizing it I turned the page on using models and nudes in my work. This group began in my living room but I’d grown frustrated trying to make unsupported sheets of Mylar take anything other than a semi random shape. I had in the previous couple years spent a lot of time renovating the basement to make a studio and gallery there and it was a clean and much larger place to work so I moved my project down there for the first time. I built a huge wooden frame and joined two sheets of Mylar together to make one big shapeable mirror that I could raise or lower with ropes. You can see me demonstrating it a bit in the video on my home page. I placed it at a 45 degree angle and used masking tape to create stretches and deformations in the Mylar mirror while placing random, colored cloths or objects at hand on the floor as “content”. I then set up my wineglass camera to shoot into the Mylar so that I caught the reflection of the objects on the floor in my shot.

I found that using the Mylar on the frame was strangely a little different. Instead of seeing the effects as brush strokes it became more as if I was using a different type of lens, but a very wacky one that seemed to reveal hidden worlds to me at the same time. A normal lens focuses the light falling on a scene so that there is a one to one correspondence between what you get in the photo and what you have before you. The Mylar mirror also collects light but it has its own logic dictated by its shape. Metaphorically speaking it seemed to me to focus on a more complex version of reality which you get if you combine all that surrounds you and don’t just restrict your perception to what is just in front of your nose. Here is the one process shot I have of the setup taken with a 35mm camera. Sadly my hand shook a bit during the shot but it shows how the mirror looked in action.