Alan & Michael Fleming
The Shining
Cydonia, Dallas [link]
Presenting Kubrick’s complicated version of “The Shining” maze the Flemings offer a Cartesian abstraction: a game of self-knowledge from a god’s perspective, notoriously failed by minotaur Jack Torrence. Flanked by ionic columns –architectural follies and figurative proxies— the setting belies stability while implying simulated contrivance as docent to madness. Dialectic knowledge tends to dwell on itself, says Hegel, erecting more elaborate constructions of diversion as a means to avoid sublation. Through the twin artists’ lens of replication and difference self-knowledge must be arrived at through a Lacanian fun-house mirror, where the other is consistently uncanny and each revelation generates occlusion.
~ Ryder Richards
images courtesy of Cydonia and the artists