Cerith Wyn Evans
Inverse Reverse Perverse
19 April – 25 May 1996
For his exhibition at Duke Street, Cerith Wyn Evans created an installation entitled, Inverse, Reverse, Perverse (1996), that consisted of a large concave mirror hung on the gallery wall. The mirror inverts and radically distorts the viewer’s reflection, producing a series of disturbing self-portraits in which they are at one moment made minuscule and, at another, enlarged beyond recognition. Wyn Evans also placed over the door of the main gallery, a back-to-front exit sign, TIX3 (1994). When reflected in the mirror, it further displaced the viewer’s sense of perceptual limits, forcing them to constantly renegotiate their phenomenological place.
In the adjoining space, Wyn Evans presented clusters of inverted photographs of himself as a child, taken by his father. These images evoke memory and raise questions about identity and expectation, as well as our experience and perception of time passing. Although he began his career as a video- and film-maker, the artist has made sculpture and installations since the early 1990s. These works use a wide range of often unexpected materials in strangely poetic combinations—ranging from bonsai trees, orchids and urine, to neon lights, firework texts, glitter balls and Morse code—to explore the phenomenology of time, language and perception.
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