To hold two opposing ideas in mind at once is a valuable and powerful act. It enables empathy; it is an antidote to extremism. It validates doubt as a productive intellectual tool. To see one thing and know another – to grapple with paradox – the mind must find a way to allow for the impossible.
Entertaining Illusion combines real objects and moving images using a variation on a 19th-century magician’s technique called “Pepper’s Ghost”. The images mysteriously exchange gestures of filling and emptying, pouring out and pouring in, giving and receiving. A tension develops along the length of the table, as these gestures are enacted while the physical objects remain fixed and apart from one another, unmoving and untouched. The two-sided nature of the piece uncouples the illusion from its theatrical origins, and creates a metaphorical, two-axis space of oppositions, of X- object and Y-image, X-motion and Y-stillness.
