Mirror / Mirror

Mirror / Mirror is an exhibition that brings together three artists based in Scotland who have graduated over the last two years, curated by Street Level Photoworks for the Tolbooth as part of Stirling Photography Festival 2023. Artists June Barton, Spencer Dent and Joanna Stawnicka each take a performative approach in their practice to explore themes around the uncanny, the personal, gender, and grief.

June Barton’s The Luminous & the Grey presents a psychedelic carousel of colour, pleasure, and pain. Inspired in part by the loss of her son, the work draws upon his experiments with psychedelia and interest in the work of Aldous Huxley to create an audio-visual installation that combines luminous layers of colour and vivid sound to create an immersive, multi-sensory experience for the viewer.

The work of Spencer Dent probes the concept of ‘genderlessness’ through a series of distorted and exaggerated self-portraits which the artist screen printed onto PVC and had stretched across custom steel frames. These commanding works sit at the crossroads of photography and performance, and the artist designed and hand-made each of the elaborate costumes in the images which at once conceal and exaggerate the human to interrogate our ideas of gender and genderlessness.

In Visions, Joanna Stawnicka combines the diaristic mode of photography with sculptural and performative elements to create a series of distinct and stylised works that bridge the gap between the conscious and unconscious. This tantalising work reveals the inherent tension and strange encounters that occur within the intersection between the mundane and the extraordinary.