Notes On: The mirror stage

Connie Brown on Rowan Thomson and Peter Derksen’s Iteration 17, mothermother, 21 August – 15 October 2022.

Transmutations—the seventeenth iteration of mothermother’s exhibition project—centres on Rowan Thomson’s photographic self-portraits that explore gender dysphoria and bodily metamorphosis using Mylar sheets, whose surface drags the image across itself, wrapping and contorting the artist’s body around its woozy contours. As large prints and from afar, they look like tightly-cropped views into the hot centre of a bonfire. We are brought back to the body by details like the artist’s phone and their nipples, multiplied several times over by the Mylar. Smaller versions of the portraits are framed by Peter Derksen’s lumpy pewter sculptures—geological forms he makes from melted candlesticks and other opshop bric-a-brac. Like the work shown recently in twisting, turning, winding: takatāpui + queer objects at Objectspace, Derksen’s frames are animated by his attempt to still the colours and effects—the fugitive inner landscapes—that his materials reveal to him as on-the-move, half-formed things throughout the making process.

Between the flapping, undulating Mylar and the bubbling molten metal, there is hardly a wall left in mothermother’s small gallery that doesn’t bear a reflective surface. But they are the imperfect kind, and if the mirror is supposed to inaugurate the ‘I function,’ Transmutations looks for another order of the ‘I’ that could emerge from the smudgy, warped reflections offered by these materials. This ‘I’ is the ebbing and flowing, hallucinatory kind, not so sure of its discreteness nor seduced by its own image, and intrigued instead by possible alchemies of the human form and other matter—of the flesh with rocks, minerals and light.

mothermother is open Thursdays, Fridays and by appointment.

All images: Rowan Thomson and Peter Derksen, Iteration 17. Installation view, mothermother, Tāmaki Makaurau, September 2022

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