A Hall of Mirrors
2026Presented as a solo exhibition at VOX Contemporary Image Centre in Montreal, QC
A Hall of Mirrors is a conceptual exhibition composed of 7 custom-built light boxes, hundreds of photographs and documents, and a feature-length essay film.
The exhibition builds on a years-long research project looking into the military-industrial giant DuPont, their dynastic familial wealth, and their little-known involvement in a wide range of developments vital to 20th-century histories of art and aesthetics. Simultaneous to its formal research, the project has also involved the construction of a “parafiction” narrative which is seamlessly woven into the story being presented, animating the research while contesting its own legitimacy.
Reconciling these two contradictory impulses through a sensorium of film Noir, A Hall of Mirrors is an exhibition of archival research that also dramatizes its own implosion and failure.
The feature-length parafiction film It’s Not Brakhage, projected on loop in the gallery’s screening room, follows an artist-researcher’s investigation into a mysterious film reel, believed to be a lost work by experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced during a ruinous 1959 collaboration with DuPont. Following the structure of a detective story, the film follows the narrator’s feverish attempt to disprove Brakhage’s authorship of the reel, and instead posit the “lost work” as a clue in Brakhage’s death in 2003 from a rare form of bladder cancer.
As the narrator searches for the “Lost Brakhage’s” actual author through an archival labyrinth of shadowy associations connecting the DuPont company with numerous prominent 20th-century artistic legacies, their investigation slowly dissolves into an anxious mise-en-abyme where identity, authorship, and intention disappear behind refractions of power and influence.
