PROXY Gallery is pleased to present the installation

"Contained Spaces" by artist Christina Hendershaw.

Hendershaw’s architectural grids on acetate line the “walls” of the Proxy Gallery which has already been lined with mirrors. The effect is of both transparency and opacity, perhaps representing the shiny office buildings of a modernist downtown, scaffoldings (by definition temporary) that appear either as a stage prior to the actual building, as in design on paper, or as the skeletal ruins posterior to a city burned or bombed out.

The Cornell-like installation, evoking large grids of cubical structures within the small cube of the Proxy Gallery, is reminiscent of the effect of daguerreotypes with their realistic yet ghostly mirrors. (There is now a Daguerreotype effect in Photoshop.) The next question is of the meaning and symbolism of such permeable structural grids: They can be received as images of alienation and entrapment in a capitalist dystopia or the signifiers of a celebratory modernism that glorifies the glass-clad tower and the air-conditioned office.

Mirrors both reflect reality (including the viewer) and conceal it by preventing penetration. The distanced view represents a cold rationality that fits with modernist ideas, but at the same time unforgiving abstraction can be a way to conceal the detailed, the specific and the affective.