Mirror Study (_Q5A3505), 2016

In Mirror Study, Sepuya creates a self-portrait in a white-walled studio. He stands behind a tripod and points his camera at a mirror. Taped to the mirror, however, is a fragment of another photograph, effectively blocking the artist’s view. This photograph-within-the-photograph further contains a relay of images engendered by mirror reflections and recursions of pictures within pictures. In art historical traditions, the artist’s studio—indicated here by the tripod, drop cloth, nude model, stacks of previously made works, and of course the artist and his instruments—is a place of privacy and interiority. To this, Sepuya adds intimacy, even eroticism: the condensation of fragmented bodies effected by the multiple mirrors’ reversals of foreground and background suggests (but does not achieve) touch and embrace, such that dynamics of longing, gazing, revealing, concealing, touching, and not touching ricochet from wall to wall and floor to ceiling.