The Nausea
Kaleidoscope Studios, Brooklyn
“I draw my face closer until it touches the mirror. The eyes, nose and mouth disappear: nothing human is left. Brown wrinkles show on each side of the feverish swelled lips, crevices, mole holes: it is a geological embossed map. And, in spite of everything, this lunar world is familiar to me.”
Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
The mirror, according to Sartre, becomes a site of the Nausea by triggering depersonalization and dysmorphia. Through reflection, we experience the existential disconnection from and disgust with the embodied self. The relationship between the self and its reflection creates a confounding cycle of visual stimulation, spiraling down a well of dissociation. In Nausea, Sartre illustrates the role that reflection plays in fueling the debasement of our self image. Can we then escape the mirror, and visualize ourselves instead through autoscopia - seeing oneself from outside of the body? Does disembodiment offer redemption, or merely feed back into the Nausea?
left: Autoscopic Mirror I, 40" x 52" right: Revelatory Disembodiment, 36" x 52"
Sensory Homunculus Crustacean, 48" x 52"
...it is no longer my head, but I feel myself inside a head, I see and I see myself inside a head; or else I do not see myself in the mirror, but I feel myself in the body that I see…”
Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon; The Logic of Sensation
The mirror, according to Deleuze, depicts a reality which is at odds with and disruptive of sensorial experience. A more accurate depiction is a sensory homunculus; an anatomical model where scale is correlated with the density of nerve endings. The homunculus is a haptic image of the body, escaping the perils of a purely optical representation. One of Sartre’s recurring motifs is the crustacean, which embodies the complete inversion of human anatomy; the internal becoming external. The abject and inhuman work as part of the Nausea to disrupt normative subjectivity and the imposed hierarchy of ocular over nervous perception. Can grotesque and uncanny anatomies recondition the expectations we have for our bodily image and sensorial awareness?
Narcissus' Pool, 48" x 52"
Autoscopic Mirror II, 40" x 52"
“The mirror stage is a drama… for the subject caught up in the lure of spatial identification, turns out fantasies that proceed from a fragmented image of the body to its totality.”
Jacques Lacan, Écrits; The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function
The mirror, according to Lacan, is a foundational instrument in the development of the ego. Through an illusory image which is misrecognized as the self, the subject enters into “primal alienation”; a false unification that conceals an underlying experience of corporal fragmentation. This fragmentation may shine through during the Nausea and psychedelic states, due to an imposed transience of the ego. During both, a mirror’s reflection becomes problematic and confounding. Can the visual language of psychedelia question and restructure how we constitute ourselves as subjects?
“While he is drinking he beholds himself reflected in the mirrored pool—and loves; loves an imagined body which contains no substance, for he deems the mirrored shade a thing of life to love.”
Ovid, Metamorphoses; Book III
The mirror, according to Ovid, becomes a trap when interpreted as representing a “real” thing. Instead, mirrors are like paintings which reflect on the conscious level rather than the corporeal. Questioning the mirror’s reflection opens gateways for us to examine our selfhood in relation to illusory, abstracted and misrecognized forms. We can symbolically deconstruct reflection through prioritizing grotesque, haptic and psychedelic representations of the body. Although the Nausea unpleasantly disorients the self, it offers emancipation through a re-imagining of our corporeal image.
“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who in this land is fairest of all?”
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Little Snow-White
Reading of an excerpt from Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, accompanied by Kyle Tomlinson on cello