In this video, vaguely inspired by Smithson’s Mirror Displacements, the line between a performative act and the presence of a protagonist is blurred. The imagery is culled from a series of walks in a straight line through the wildly different environs of New York City and the New Mexico Desert in which I wore a large convex mirror (typically used for catching shoplifters) on my back. Each step forward (and away from the camera) places a distorted image of what is left behind (or the past steps) in the mirror and alters the landscape. The sound is composed to create a tension fitting to seeing the past and the present together through the mechanism of the mirror that is directly opposed to but another mirror, the camera lens.

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