collection studies: california museum of photography

Mirror Mirror

California Museum of Photography
February 9 - May 12, 2019
Curated by Douglas McCulloh

About the Exhibition

Mirror Mirror features a building taking a picture of itself. On Sunday, June 7, 1987, photographer Darryl Curran set about to transform the closed Kress department store in downtown Riverside into a walk-in camera obscura. The structure was shuttered, with plans underway to remake it into the California Museum of Photography. The artist blacked out the front display windows to create a camera. He fashioned multiple pinhole apertures and jury-rigged a darkroom in a basement storeroom. Finally, Curran commandeered a pair of abandoned dressing room mirrors. He deployed them on the mall to reflect the building front. One the next month of June 1987, he made scores of photographs. The pictures, Curran states, are “a result of the building taking a picture of itself.” They are self-reflexive. They are building selfies.

Curran was operating at the invitation of museum director Charles Desmarais. In that spirit, Mirror Mirror invited four contemporary Southern California artists to respond to Curran’s work. Following Curran’s lead (and in several instances employing his images), Karchi Perlmann, Andrew K. Thompson, Jonas Yip, and Jody Zellen used the museum - its archive, history, online manifestations, and camera collection- to produce additional, inventive institutional self-portraits.

Curator’s Notes: Jonas Yip’s Collection Studies

For his Mirror Mirror contribution, Jonas Yip traveled to where photographs now live—the web. Using automated software, he downloaded every image from the extensive online postings that represent the California Museum of Photography’s research collections. Then he culled. His titles signal Yip’s choices: the camera collections, photographs by A.C. Vroman, early color photochroms, and so on.

Yip’s images are layered, but they were not made, as is the default assumption, using Adobe Photoshop. Instead, the artist essentially acted as a “disc jockey” of images, projecting a series of them live, and recording the results. Yip set up a computer, a screen, and projector. He put his iPhone on a tripod and used an app called Average Camera Pro. (Ninety-nine cents in the Apple app store). Average Camera Pro automatically takes an extended sequence of pictures, digitally compositing them into a single image. With his phone taking 16 (or sometimes 32) photographs at two second intervals, Yip manually projected the museum’s downloaded photographs from his laptop. He made hundreds of passes. Each time, he varied the pace of projection, lingered on different images. Every session produced a different results, each a dance with chance. “To me, the process, the idea, is the central interest, and the results are a surprise.”

—Douglas McCulloh, curator