Past exhibitions

Shadows, body doubles and mirrors at play in photography and the moving image

Shadow Catchers, part of the Gallery’s Contemporary Collection Projects series, investigates the way shadows, body doubles and mirrors haunt our understanding of photography and the moving image.

A photograph is like a mirror, reflecting but also preserving a replica of the real. Like Alice’s looking glass, however, photographic images aren’t always exact transcriptions of reality. Their replicated scenes can bend the truth and bleed into illusion or abstraction.

Through photographs that use the mirror as a means of duplication and distortion, groups that operate as pictorial echoes, studies of split selves, and tributes to the looped structure of cinematic time, this exhibition contends with the complexity of the photographic and filmic mediums and the way images both reflect and refract reality.