The Mirror Between Us, an exhibition of performative photographs by Sherry Wiggins and Luis Filipe Branco, will be installed at the Igreja de Sao Vicente in Evora, Portugal, April 16- June 4, 2022. This exhibition was curated by Carolien van der Laan and Ludger van der Eerden, founders of the OBRAS Foundation in Evoramonte, Portugal. Cydney Payton wrote the essay for the exhibit, originally scheduled for 2020 and rescheduled for 2022 due to the covid pandemic.

MIRROR IMAGE

Essay by Cydney M. Payton

“The camera is the ideal arm of consciousness.” —Susan Sontag

Mere scattered light and atoms make photographs. A photograph multiplies the self into another dimension, a rotation in the vector of two objects to create a mirror image of the other. As Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography, the camera allows one to lay claim to another reality. Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco’s collaborative project The Mirror Between Us / O Espelho Entre Nós presents us with questions about female agency in such reality creation.

Today, the general nature of self-representation has become complicated by the full-throttle world of image manufacturing and collection—Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, news cycles. We are overburdened with sorting not only pictures but their implied histories and meanings. It is clear that making artistic work is far from the immediacy of a snapshot. So, when we look at the Wiggins/Branco photographs what are we to look for? The subject, easily identified as the artist Wiggins, is a woman of a certain age. Yet, it is in the broader subjects of landscape and nature that the narrative splits from that preconception. Amid lush fields and ancient cork trees, an artisanal past comes forward in idyllic even aggressive presentations of womanhood in nature.

The collaboration between Wiggins and photographer Luís Filipe Branco began in 2015 when Wiggins entered a residency at the rural OBRAS Foundation near Evoramonte in Portugal. Arriving from her home in Boulder, Colorado, Wiggins was already committed to a long-term investigation that she termed Searching Selves, a conceptual process whereby she would delve into the artistic practices of other artists. The aim was to challenge her studio practice by studying then traveling to locations where the artists lived to make work that conceptually spoke about her art and its relationship to those she was excavating. For Wiggins, intellectually and artistically embodying other artist’s work has become a unique methodology to confront ideas about female (re)presentation. At OBRAS, she had chosen to investigate the late Portuguese artist Helena Almeida who, like Wiggins, had a history of making performative photographs.

Initially, Branco came to OBRAS to document Wiggins’ Almeida-adjacent performances. For this work—performance, photographs, drawings—Wiggins entered into an Almeida-like emotional space. Where Almeida sought to arrange the body as a performance of painting, Wiggins would arrange the body against a material structure. Branco’s first photographs of Wiggins show a woman almost dancing on an overblown abstracted red flower designed with fabric. Branco, known as a photojournalist but trained as a fine artist, wanted the chance to make his images using Wiggins in a classical sense as an artist’s model. However, once their work began things quickly changed; the making of images became more of an exchange between the two artists, a mirroring, as seen in Two Chairs, at Herdade da Marmeleira, 2015 and Two Sherrys at Herdade da Marmeleira, 2015. Over the following four years, Wiggins/Branco would create five projects with Wiggins in the roles of creative agitator, model, and director and Branco as producer and image-maker. The Mirror Between Us represents work from four of those collaborations all produced in Portugal. The most recent project, inspired by the French artist Claude Cahun (1894-1954), began in the Netherlands in 2019 and is planned for production in 2021.

By creating a process of collaboration built on sites and ideas—some of which followed Wiggins continued Searching Selves investigation and others which evolved from their mutual interest in the landscape—Wiggins/Branco have generated several bodies of work largely gripped by issues of feminist presentation. By this I mean, that we cannot look at these photographs without impressing upon them the various histories of how women have been, and are, looked at. To some viewers, the largest consideration might be Wiggins’ age. By examining it, weighing it against notions of youth and beauty, we can see the agency that an older female body can have when captured by the lens against the landscape.

As we know, the notion of landscape is a modern invention. Historically, it was a word that came to represent the way gentry borrowed views thus cultivating and often stealing both image and land. In this regard, landscape implies acts of aggression, theft of property. The term arose in isolation from a true understanding that woodlands, hills, plains can never be truly owned. Landscape provided the means for nature to be lawfully bartered, traded, occupied. Borrowing a view might seem noble but it also suggests gendered exploitation of boundaries as property rights were for generations the domain of men. We can easily imagine that Seat at Evoramonte, 2019, suggests a kind of occupation by an unwanted figure on someone else’s land or expulsion of the woman in the frame from inside a home to the wilds outside. We see the body in this image precariously situated on a chair that tilts against the horizon with a single, almost skeletal tree, her hair echoing its loosely structural form. Branco has given the image weight by pushing the dynamic between the two objects—body and tree—with a sparseness that relates his work to Portuguese photographer Paulo Nozolino known for high-contrast black and white images with raw yet poetical graphic power.

In the series Outside Woman I & II, 2019, there is a reversal of this historic reading of the feminine body and nature. Until the nineteenth century most women, those without wealth and status, were held captive by domestic roles that led them to be rarely seen unaccompanied outside. Even peering from a window was seen as dangerous; the female body uncontained and being of nature posed a threat to male sexuality and power. In the photographs Outside Woman I & II, the woman is not only literally outside the window but she is draped in sheer flesh-colored fabric seemingly autoerotically possessed, drawing us into a conversation about statuary and ancient goddesses. Aphrodite comes forward but it is pre-Hellenic goddess Astarte in her aspect as the “Queen of the Evening Star,” a goddess of love, who resides in Wiggins’ provocation.

A more contemporary view suggests that the female form in Outside Woman I & II, being released from the bondage of domesticity, finds its natural footing unbound in nature while the camera with its implied maleness—to aim and shoot—remains trapped inside. Still, it has to be acknowledged that there is an edge of voyeurism to the images, a tilt of the power toward the lens and its operator. However, the woman appears unaware of the presence of being viewed—being shot—deferring the position of power to an external body of viewership such as us.

The coupling of these two artists—female and male, artist and cameraman—court criticality. Issues of power and sexuality are entwined with any reading of the work. These are issues in this era not to be overlooked. The bargain that is being struck between informed audiences and the image makers is that the work holds value in the presentation of the very ideas and concepts that might be objectionable in feminism; that we can gauge the power that is being brought into question, seeing it lob back and forth between the two artists.

Ultimately, the structure of this collaboration is directed by Wiggins’ incisive pursuit of self through reflection. It becomes evident in the repetitive figuration and performative practice that is being worked. However, Branco’s role is more than one of an absorptive responder, it requires attunement and mediation of technical and ephemeral factors. From Sontag, we also learn, “Photographs don’t seem deeply beholden to the intentions of an artist. Rather, they owe their existence to a loose cooperation (quasi-magical, quasi-accidental) between photographer and subject.” If this holds, then the images from the Wiggins/Branco collaboration move beyond a gendered platform into a more open conversation about dialogue in artistic practice, something that is often overlooked by a continued interest in the preciousness of production as largely an individualistic form to be codified as genius, even today, and especially in photography. Regardless, the photographs are not moralistic, but more representative of the oft-overlooked subjects—women and age.

This mirroring between the artists lends complexity to the Wiggins/Branco photographs as they are seen against the contemporary gloss of pictures created and consumed today. In Mirror at Santa Susanna, 2017, a woman holds an oval mirror refracting a blot of sunlight. It blinds the viewer from seeing the reflection of the camera lens, the photographer, and the artist in the mirror. This blast of light directs us to look in more detail at the background where arches of an ancient aqueduct run alongside a lake, now almost emptied by severe drought.

Civilizations’ first mirrors were pools of water—ponds, lakes, streams, oceans. Searching for a reflection of self in the surface of water, metal or glass is as ancient as the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. Yet, even to this day, mirrors like cameras, are seen by some as instruments that trap the soul negating individualism and soulfulness. It is as if the artists have chosen Santa Susannaas a site for their project to speak about its lost abilities as a soul-catcher since a lake without a watery surface is a lake abandoned by its phantasmagorical language. Wiggins/Branco’s Mirror at Santa Susanna bids us examine the connections between Santa Susanna and her lost art of reflection.

Reflection by definition throws back a body or surface of light without absorbing it. What makes us want to see ourselves in such a transitory dimension? Philosopher Jacques Lacan posited that “mirroring” is necessary to the primacy of development. Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage theorized that our earliest recognition of selfhood through reflection creates a way for the individual to define self against the spatial objectness of all that is around us. With the title, The Mirror Between Us, Wiggins/Branco have suggested that a mirror need not be directly situated for self-image. That it is in the middle space, between two objects, two reflections, that we are bound to what is timelessly feminine, axial and a vector, for the self and others.

The last word from Sontag on what appeals to us about looking at such images as those in this grouping and questioning what gives them artistic grounding. “Through photographs we follow in the most intimate, troubling way the reality of how people age.” She continues by stating, that to look back at a photograph of oneself or of anyone, famed or ordinary, artist or not, “is to feel, first of all, how much younger (she, he) was then.” No matter how long ago the image was made it still sits in the past. This is the experience, putting a gage on mortality, that attracts us to photography in general but it is also what attracts us to The Mirror Between Us, as we are witnessing a historic event, a past encounter, some kind of documentary evidence of the subject’s age made ageless by its photographic transcription.

—Cydney M. Payton

Notes

1. Susan Sontag, On Photography, (New York, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971). iii-lxx

2. A listing of Wiggins’ project Searching Selves to date, by order of production, includes Russian-American avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren; Indian minimalist Nasreen Mohamedi; Portuguese conceptualist Helena Almeida; Brazilian multimedia artist Mira Schendel; and French writer and photographer Claude Cahun.

This essay occasions The Mirror Between Us / O Espelho Entre Nos, an exhibition of performative photographs by Sherry Wiggins and Luis Filipe Branco at the Igreja de Sao Vicente in Evora, Portugal, April 16-June 4, 2022. The opening is Saturday April 16^th at 5 pm.

Other projects by Wiggins/Branco include the exhibitions Meeting Her Again/ Reencontrando-a for the Palacio dos Marqueses de Praia e Monforte, Estremoz, Portugal and Michael Warren Contemporary, Denver, Colorado (2017), Selected Works for The Month of Photography, Redline Contemporary Art Center, Denver (2019), and THE UNKNOWN HEROINE (2021) for Michael Warren Contemporary accompanied by a limited-edition artists book.

SHERRY WIGGINS lives in Boulder, Colorado. Her artistic practice addresses feminist relational processes and enactments. Over three decades her work has taken multiple forms such as drawings, installations, performances, photographs, public art, sculptures, video and writing. Wiggins has exhibited extensively in the U.S. and internationally in Brazil, India, the Middle East, and Portugal to name a few. She is represented by Michael Warren Contemporary in Denver, Colorado.

LUIS FILIPE BRANCO lives in Lisbon, Portugal. Luis began his career as a photojournalist at the Jornal Publico in Lisbon. Since then, Branco has worked as a freelance photographer, documentary filmmaker and fine art photographer collaborating with numerous musicians, poets and visual artists,

CYDNEY M. PAYTON lives in Monterey, California. She is a contemporary art curator and writer.

The artists wish to extend their sincere gratitude to the curators of The Mirror Between Us, Carolien van der Laan and Ludger van der Eerden, founders of the Foundation OBRAS in Evormonte, Portugal. In addition, the artists thank the Municipality of Evora and Margarida Branco for providing the beautiful exhibition space in the Igreja de Sao Vicente in the historic center of Evora, Portugal. The artists also extend a special acknowledgement to Joseph Logan for the design of this booklet.

Muse, tell me the things done by golden Aphrodite,

the one from Cyprus, who arouses sweet desire for gods

and who subdues the populations of mortal humans,

and birds as well, who fly in the sky, as well as all beasts

– all those that grow on both dry land and the sea [pontos].

They all know the things done by the one with the beautiful garlands, the one from Cythera.

• From the anonymous “Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite” c. 7^th century BC translated by Gregory Nagy

Aphrodite (the ancient Greek goddess of beauty, love, marriage, passion, pleasure, procreation, prostitution and more) has arisen for me as a fascinating representative of female sexuality and agency. She is literally a fluid subject born of the ocean and celebrating, performing, supporting (and manipulating) love in all its various forms. I have begun my research into the mythos, history and meaning of Aphrodite along with her spiritual ancient Greek daughters/sisters the beautiful Helen of Troy (and Sparta and Argos) and the great poet Sappho of Lesbos. I intend to enact and embody these heroines of ancient Greece when I return to Portugal in a few weeks (March 22^nd) to work with my collaborator, photographer, Luis Branco. This process of investigation and manifestation, that I have employed with several other historical heroines (most recently Eve and Salome), puts me in a kind of fugue state. I literally enter into these fabled women’s footsteps, bosoms, psyches and the mythologies that surround them. I examine these heroines / figures in ancient texts, contemporary scholarship and also in their representations in multiple art forms throughout history. Of course, many of these historic representations and texts are by men, so I must take this into account in my reimagining of these heroines.  I contemplate these storied women and remake them in my own vision and visage.

Aphrodite emerges in early Greek history, literature, mythology as a syncretic goddess. Her powerful antecedent goddesses from the ancient civilizations across the waters of the Eastern Mediterranean are the Bronze Age deities; Innana, Ishtar and Astarte (and there are many more). Astarte was a goddess of the Phoenician and Canaanite pantheons associated with war, sexuality and royal power. All these ancient goddesses represented sexuality, power and fertility in varying degrees.

Aphrodite has been represented as a powerful, sometimes deceitful and manipulative, overwhelmingly beautiful and seductive goddess from her early beginnings in Greek mythology, cosmology, poetry and art. There are several different legends of Aphrodite’s birth— I am most compelled by the story of her primal birth in Hesiod’s “Theogony” (literally “The Birth of the Gods” composed between 730 and 700 BC). The story goes like this . . .

The world began with the spontaneous generation of four primordial beings: Chaos (the original Space in which creation takes place); then Gaia (Earth); Tartarus (Void) and Eros (Desire). These primal beings produced many elemental progeny. From Chaos came Darkness, Night, Brightness, Day . . . Gaia’s progeny includes Ouranus the Sky god, Ourea the Mountain god and Pontus the Sea god. Gaia (the elemental Earth goddess) has many offspring with her own son Ouranus the Sky god; these include the twelve Titans (Chronos among them), Cyclops and many other pretty horrific primal beings. Gaia becomes weary of the burden of bearing these difficult beings with Ouranus. She devises a plan to castrate Ouranos with a huge metal sickle or knife. Gaia asks their son Chronos to perform this task and Chronos agrees.

This is part of the story from Hesiod’s “Theogony” lines 176 to 200 (I am not sure whose translation this is):

And now on came great Ouranos, bringing Night with him.

And, longing for love, he settled himself all over Earth.

From his dark hiding-place, the son reached out

With his left hand, while with his right he swung

The fiendishly long and jagged sickle, pruning the genitals

Of his own father with one swoop and tossing them

Behind him, where they fell to no small effect.

Earth soaked up all the bloody drops that spurted out,

And as the seasons went by she gave birth to the Furies

And to great Giants gleaming in full armor, spears in hand,

And to the Meliai, as ash-tree Nymphs are generally called.

The genitalia themselves, freshly cut with flint, were thrown

Clear of the mainland into the restless, white-capped sea,

Where they floated a long time. A white foam from the god-flesh

Collected around them, and in that foam a maiden developed

And grew. Her first approach to land was near holy Cythera,

And from there she floated on to the island of Cypros.

There she came ashore, an awesome, beautiful divinity.

Tender grass sprouted up under her slender feet.

Aphrodite

Is her name in speech human and divine, since it was in foam

She was nourished. But she is also called Cythereia since

She reached Cythera, and Cyprogenes because she was born

On the surf-line of Cypros, and Philommedes because she loves

The organs of sex, from which she made her epiphany.

Eros became her companion, and ravishing Desire waited on her

At her birth and when she made her debut among the Immortals.

From that moment on, among both gods and humans,

She has fulfilled the honored function that includes

Virginal sweet-talk, lovers’ smiles and deceits,

And all of the gentle pleasures of sex.

This is quite the elemental image and idea— beautiful Aphrodite emerges fully formed; born of Ouranus’s castrated giant phallus. The “foam” from which Aphrodite arises is the semen of her father Ouranus the god of the Sky. Her half-brother Chronos is the perpetrator of this heinous deed, castrating his own father at the bequest of his mother Earth (Gaia). Aphrodite is gestated in this matrix/fluid of her father’s phallus. She arises from the sea foam / seminal fluid with her two companions Eros (Eros is the primordial god of Love and sex) and Himeros (the god of uncontrollable and ravishing Desire). One of Aphrodite’s Greek names is Philommedes which has two meanings; both “genital loving” and “smile loving.” This story of her birth in Hesiod’s Theogony pre-dates the birth of Zeus and the other Olympian gods and goddesses. In other stories (Homer et all) she is the progeny of Zeus and the Titan goddess of the ocean, Dione.

Aphrodite was worshipped throughout the Mediterranean from the early Archaic period of Greek history (750 BC – 500 BC) on through the Classical and Hellenistic times. The Romans took Aphrodite on as their own and she morphs into the goddess Venus, along with the other dieties in the Greek Pantheon. Temples were built for her worship, rituals were performed in her name.  Statues and artworks heralded her beauty and power and her many physical and spiritual attributes. Aphrodite was associated the element of water that she was born of and the islands of Cythera and Cyprus. She was also associated with sacred mountains, where temples were built in her name. Aphrodite was floral—she loved flowers and fruits (the rose, narcissus, lily, poppy, pomegranate, apple, quince). Birds are an important part of Aphrodite’s entourage; doves, ducks, geese and swans.  Aphrodite is intrinsically “golden”—this means not only gold the precious metal; her goldenness is her inherent beauty. Aphrodite is associated with the dawn, she is a solar goddess.

The ancient Greek Aphrodite occupied a broad and bountiful sexual territory. She was the goddess of marital love as well as erotic love. Aphrodite was married to the crippled god Hephaistos—god of Fire, craft and metalsmithing but she was not in love with Hephaistos. She had a long passionate affair with Ares the god of War. Hephaistos caught them in the act of love and cast a finely crafted golden net over the lovers, which they were later released from. Hephaistos divorced Aphrodite, divorce amongst the gods . . . very modern. She had liaisons with many of the other gods; Dionysius, Hermes and Poseidon. Goddesses were not supposed to lay with mortal men, however not so with Aphrodite. Aphrodite had a passionate and tragic affair with the beautiful mortal man Adonis, as well as her affair with the Trojan prince Anchises. She had many children: with Ares she had Eros, Phobos, Deimos, Harmonia, Pothos, Anteros, and Himeros; with Hermes she had Hermaphroditus; with Posiedon she had Rhodos and Eryx; with Dionysus she had Peitho, The Graces and Priapu; and with the Trojan prince Anchises she bore Aeneus. Aphrodite was sexually generous and liberated, the lover of genitals (smile) and also very generative in terms of her progeny.

Aphrodites beauty and sensuality  was celebrated in sculptures and paintings from early Greek times and on into the Hellenistic and Roman times. The Aphrodite of Knidos is perhaps the most famous of these sculptures. The original sculpture is lost to us and the sculpture above is a Roman copy of the original Greek sculpture by Praxiteles of Athens created around the 4^th century BC. The original sculpture is believed to be one of the first life sized representations of the nude female form in Greek history. The original sculpture has been copied many times and evolved in various ways. You can see in the Aphrodite of Knidos sculpture that Aphrodite is gesturing modestly and covering her pubic area. In many of the subsequent nude Aphrodite / Venus sculptures, she also covers a breast. The term “Venus pudica”  is a designation used in western art that  refers to this classical form of a woman hiding her pubic area, and sometimes her breasts, almost with a sense of shame. Early Greek sculptures of Aphrodite started this trend of modesty or shame (which arose again in the Renaissance and afterwards) which seems unfortunate to me in terms of the representation of female sexuality and beauty. Although these nude sculptures are gorgeous and sensuous, they also speak to the disempowerment of Aphrodite the goddess of Love. Our “original” Aphrodite; who arose from the phallus of her father the Sky; who lay with the gods and mortals without shame; would not cover herself coyly in this way.

Rome adapted and repurposed the mythology and iconography of Aphrodite into the goddess Venus, still a powerful goddess of love and but also victory and war.  During the early Christian era evidence of Venus and Aphrodite (and many other Greek and Roman icons, temples and emblems of “pagan” culture) were destroyed or desecrated and built upon. Aphrodite / Venus submerged / disappeared  for hundreds of years . . .

Aphrodite reborn . . .

Aphrodite / Venus was resurrected for us in the Western world during the Renaissance and beyond. In Sandro Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” she is literally reborn in her golden glory and she is accompanied by the gods of the winds, Zephyr and Aura. The Hora of spring is ready to cloth Aphrodite / Venus. I have posted below some of my favorite and more famous Aphrodite / Venus paintings of the Renaissance, the Baroque, the Rococo, the French Academic  and the Pre-Raphaelite periods. Only one of these paintings is by a woman, the Italian Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi. Aphrodite / Venus is always white, the Ruben’s painting shows her with her black maid.  Aphrodite / Venus’s influence on our thoughts about beauty, desire and different forms of love and sexual relationships and womanhood reflects back to us in subtle and complicated ways. Notice still the “Venus pudica” stance in many of these paintings which can be either standing or prone. She is always sexy but is she always powerful/empowered?

And in the 20^th Century we had many “Golden Goddesses” of film, here are a few of my favorites:

And finally my favorite Golden Goddess / Diva of the 21^st Century—who does appear sexy, powerful and pregnant at the 2017 Grammy Awards:

This has been a deep dive for me into the origins and evolution of “My Aphrodite” —goddess of Beauty, Love, Sexuality and Power . . .