A Mirror to Vanity invites us to subvert our first impressions in favour of a deeper, perhaps darker, second revelation. The six artists - Richard Dean Hughes, Laura Lancaster, Lyle Perkins, Glen Pudvine, Maria Szakats & Katie Tomlinson - use historical and mythological imagery, popular culture, and humour as accessible, unthreatening entry points to draw us in only to expose other reflections upon further examination.
The exhibition is titled after a 17th Century Dutch memento mori painting Truth Presenting a Mirror to the Vanities of the World by an unknown artist. The painting depicts Truth - as it was traditionally personified by a female figure with scales and a mirror, in this instance, with a skull gazing out of the composition, its back reflected in the mirror. Continuing the centuries-old practice of artists using mirrors, windows, or water to suggest or reveal secondary readings in their paintings, the artists in A Mirror to Vanity use these liminal surfaces to examine the slippery idea of public, personal and perceived truth.
Considered together, the artworks express an awareness of impermanence, the precarity of hard-held beliefs or understandings. Ancient woodlands blaze, ripples still, civilisations fall, and pillars of popular culture date - badly. However, as there was 400 hundred years ago, there is hope to draw from these contemporary memento mori’s. Horace’s carpe diem instruction has become such a cliche as to have almost lost all meaning, but his advice nonetheless stands true: seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the next one.
