In this video, initially inspired by Robert Smithson’s Mirror Displacements, the line between a document of a performative art action and a filmic narrative with protagonist is intentionally blurred. The imagery is culled from a series of walks in a straight line through the wildly different environments of New York City and the New Mexico Desert in which I wore a large convex mirror on my back.

Each step forward (and away from the camera) places a distorted image of what is left behind, disrupting time and place through the opposition of this large convex mirror to the similarly convex mirror of the camera lens. Aside from warping the visual field, it also displaces the privileged place of the observer from the observed. The convex mirror strapped to my back is typically used as security device for catching potential shoplifters. In this case this tool for surveillance "from above" is turned outward in order to project and directly alter its environment.

CInematography by Paris Mancini and Scott Kiernan
Shot in NYC, New Mexico, Maine; Spring/Summer 2008