SELF DIRECTED: TOTAL EXTERNAL REFLECTION
Total External Reflection, 2023. By Stephanie Bouris. 900x1840mm bond paper prints on MDF board, kiln fired glass. Installed Level 2 of the Old Teacher's College, Camperdown.
My artwork Total External Reflection is named after the physical concept Total Internal Reflection, which describes a phenomenon where waves of light arriving at the boundary of one medium and another are not refracted into the second medium, but instead the light is totally reflected back into the first medium. This is impossible within a sphere and describes the opposite phenom that produces the effect in this work.
Total External Reflection exploits and explores the interaction of glass and light in tiny spheres produced incidentally from scraps in the kiln to draw attention to the beautiful mundanity of my eczema and skin. When the flash of my Aspera Jazz 2's camera hits a glass sphere the light is refracted through the whole object, producing what appears as a white dot on the image. The glass beads were applied to my body and surrounds as jewellery and create a visual attention to my features as they parallel my pimples, bring out the texture of my eczema, and sparkle along with my weeping rashes. The beads are the surrealist element of the images that facilitate the impact of the sheer mundanity of the subject matter.
The concept and visual language of the work is informed by internet aesthetics- the bedroom photography, banal grunge, and camera roll selfies that surround me in online spaces like tumblr. Blogs like xvisualtreasure09x and ripempezardexerox create and curate images that are the cyber equivalent of readymades- jpegs and pngs scavenged from across cyberspace. The banal and ubiquitous is a theme in my wider body of work and the "framing the mundane and ubiquitous as something that carries aesthetic and historical significance" philosophy of Robert Smithson I think encapsulates my work. Aesthetically artists like Hop Nguyen (february-22 on tumblr) informed my work with low-res, personal, and urban visual themes.
The images are curated from my camera roll and arranged on the MDF board as such. Images were printed A4 size on my father's home printer. The loss of visual information from the home printing process not only reinforces the mundane, everyday language of the work but also increases the visual impact of the refraction phenomenon. Images were laid on the board with glue and layered over one another in a compilation. The camera roll screenshots on the left side of the work become a meta reference to the material process and a reference to the idea of the modern smartphone camera roll as a place of largely unimportant documentation. The work is installed specifically in an empty recess in the wall at the end of a hallway in the OTC, allowing the work to blend into its environment.
Total External Reflection is a thoroughly contemporary work about the acceptance of self and self-image- by imposing a large-scale compilation of images documenting a skin condition the artist reflects on a total acceptance of their most external self.