“Reproduction of Reflection” continues this exploration of human vs. machine as she performed inside a life-size brownie box camera and questions how we perceive ourselves through pictures, photographs, and images. The projection was carefully selected as an image of an authentic dollhouse from 1910, around the same era of the camera. The relationship between the imagery of the past is in contrast with the avant-garde technicality of the piece. This paradoxical experience translates how the human brain relates to an image as a portal to another world or an escape into a memory. When getting in connection with a picture, the mind constructs identifications with each of the objects represented. Thus a protean emotion emerges from these memories and Trenda shows how technology has fostered new and unhinging relationships of this kind.
During the performance, the viewer engages by looking into the lens of the camera. They saw an image of themselves through an LCD screen placed inside a box on the top of the artist’s head. The viewer’s face is digitalized and transmigrated into a hybrid world which becomes half human / half machine, half real / half unreal. A new entity is created and we can wonder whether it is an abstract picture of the viewer’s psyche, or a human-robot having borrowed the viewer’s face? Is it a living photograph or a human performance?
Trenda is challenging our senses, our mental representations and the relationship we bear to our own picture. Is the viewer actually watching the piece or is the piece watching the viewer?
Frank Navarro.
