What shine does to an object, in installation art and brand experience
I have a boombox covered in tiny mirrors that has now appeared in two of my installations. It's an ordinary boombox, round speakers, antennas and all. In the first, it sat in a white room near a mirrored Virgin Mary. In the one I'm working on now, it goes on a silver pedestal among a miniature Obelisco of Buenos Aires, a figurine of Mafalda, the Argentine comic-strip girl, and televisions playing VHS tapes from my childhood. The mosaic left its shape intact and gave it a promotion.
In Buenos Aires, little mirrors have a bad reputation. Selling someone espejitos de colores, little colored mirrors, means fooling them with something shiny and worthless. The phrase comes with a schoolbook picture of the conquest: mirrors and glass beads traded for gold. I use that same material to give an object presence, to lift it up. The contradiction makes me ask what shine actually does, when it consecrates and when it deceives.
The boombox offers a first clue. It's still a boombox; you can recognize it from across the room. What changed is its place in the room and the way people look at it when they walk in.
What a Little Mirror Does
A flat mirror and a mosaic of small mirrors do very different things to an object. If I cover a box with a single mirrored surface, the box starts reflecting the room back: the floor, the wall, the lamp, whoever walks by. In the right light, its volume melts into its surroundings, and what you see is the room in the shape of a box. On the objects I've covered in mosaic, something else happens. The joints between tiles draw a grid that holds the shape together, and on a curved surface each tile sits at a slightly different angle. The object stays put and recognizable, while the light breaks into hundreds of points that travel across its surface and spill onto the walls.
Format matters too. A grid of large, even tiles reads as dance floor; a fine mosaic that follows a curve reads closer to jewelry. Size also splits the effect between image and sparkle. A large tile gives back an image, big enough to catch the room or a face. A small tile reflects less and sparkles more, because each piece can only send back a point of light. For a brand, that choice decides whether visitors see themselves or see the product glow. As with the size of a cutout in a collage, each choice changes what the object says before anyone catches their reflection in it.
That's why I choose mirror mosaic, sold in stores as disco tile. It enhances an object without stealing the spotlight, and at the same time it owns its presence: a mirrored object doesn't apologize for shining. It doesn't compete with the room either. It completes it, reflecting back fragments of everything around it.
What interests me most is that mosaic has time built into it. What it reflects depends on the light, your position and the moment: in the morning it shows one thing; at night, under a warm lamp, something else. Step a couple of feet to the side and every fragment changes, so two people standing in front of the same object at the same second see two different objects. There's one object, but the image belongs to whoever is looking. A mirrored object behaves like a small constellation, a fixed body whose points of light rearrange themselves for every viewer.
This is true of any mirror, and I see it at home. My bathroom has a huge white wall that I covered with gold-framed mirrors. What I care about is less how they look than what they reflect: one thing when I'm washing my hands, another when I'm sitting down, and now, from in there, you can see parts of the living room that never used to reach the bathroom. The mirrors gave that room views its architecture didn't have.
The Right to Glamour
In Haus of Luna, I covered a figure of the Virgin Mary in small mirrors and placed her in an all-white room with a disco ball. A mirrored Virgin is a different thing from a plain one. Not every Virgin needs to look like this, but this one showed another side of her: why couldn't she have a little glamour? And it went beyond glamour. All that shine gave her a divine, almost magical glow. The mosaic brought her closer to the dance floor while restoring the radiance that has always surrounded sacred images.
Behind her, oval rings of white neon framed her like a mandorla, the almond-shaped halo that Christian art places around holy figures. I wanted to give her that lift, a sacred aura with a touch of outer space. The pedestal was covered in mirror tiles too, echoing the rings in fragments. Both formats lived in one piece: the mosaic followed the folds of her mantle, and the base was an even grid.
The combination mattered. As in collage, context and placement change what a piece means. The same mirrored Virgin would have told a different story in the red kitchen. From that kitchen, the doorway framed the white room like a picture within a picture, and the Virgin appeared at the far end, surrounded by light.
Shine and the sacred go back a long way together. In Iran, ayeneh-kari, a traditional technique of setting mirror fragments into plaster, covers entire shrine interiors. The Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian took the mirrored interior of the Shah Cheragh shrine in Shiraz as her starting point and brought mirror mosaic into contemporary sculpture.
The word itself holds on to that connection. Glamour first appears in early eighteenth-century Scots, meaning a magic spell, as an altered form of grammar: in the Scotland of the time, book learning shaded into the occult. Walter Scott brought it into general English, and only around 1840 did it come to mean alluring beauty. Before it described Hollywood stars, it described a spell.
What I find interesting in that history is that devotion and glamour share a technique: making something shine so it can be seen as more than it is. The mirrored Virgin remained a religious image and gained a presence in the room that also belongs to the night, the dance floor and the diva.
Glamour is also contagious. The mosaic reflects back pieces of whoever is looking: an eye, half a mouth, the color of a T-shirt, scattered across hundreds of tiles. The person ends up folded into the surface of an object that has already been elevated. We become part of a thousand little mirrors. In that red kitchen, where the refrigerator was covered in small mirrors, someone told me they had felt like a diva. That was exactly what I wanted for that room, and I take it as a sign that the shine I gave an object rubbed off on the person using it.
Borrowed Light
A small mirror only has the light that reaches it. The moon, the most-watched light in the night sky, works the same way: its glow is borrowed. Some researchers suggest that shiny things attract us for reasons older than any culture, because they remind us of water, which we can't live without. Their evidence only partly backed the idea, but I like where it points. Long before anyone made a mirror, we saw ourselves in still water.
Mosaic borrows its color too, taking on whatever is nearby. A neon tube next to something covered in mirror tiles changes its whole appearance, and color film tints everything the mirrors reflect. In a brand activation, that becomes a practical tool: the brand's color can live in the lighting, and the same mirrored object can take on a new identity from one event to the next with nothing more than a change of light.
Perception adds another layer. A group of vision scientists studied how the brain decides whether a surface is shiny or matte, and found that it relies on motion. When reflections slide across a rotating object, we see it as shiny; when they stick to its surface as if painted on, we see it as matte, even though each frame on its own looks glossy. We only fully see shine when something moves, and in a room, the thing that moves most is the person looking.
That changes how I think about activations. People move through them, from the line to the exit, drifting closer, circling, moving on. A mirrored object works harder along that path, where people pass it or come upon it around a corner, than parked at the back of a photo op. It also means a photograph strips a mirrored object of the very thing the brain uses to read its shine. For a brand fighting for attention on screens, that's an advantage: the image travels, and the best part stays with the people who showed up. And since no two people move the same way, each one leaves with a shine of their own. Brands spend heavily on personalization through data, screens and sensors; a mirror mosaic gives every visitor a different image through physics alone, without collecting any data. Call it analog personalization.
In the installation I'm working on, the boombox from the opening will sit among objects from my Buenos Aires childhood. Part of why I want it there is what it will reflect: fragments of that origin, with the face of whoever leans in among them. For me, that reflection is a way of seeing myself in the place I come from. It's still a boombox, and it's about to get promoted again.
What I want from shine, whether on a Virgin, a refrigerator or a brand's product, is that it lift whatever it covers without hiding it. From a mirror, I want something more. A mirror sets up a relationship between the viewer and the space: it pulls them closer, makes them step aside, search for their face among the fragments, discover a corner of the room they hadn't noticed. That's where perception, the question running through all my work, turns into action. In front of a mirror, looking means moving. //SC
Research Notes
UNC Endeavors, gold and candlelight in medieval painting, 2006
Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” 1949, in Écrits.
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964.
Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors, 1533, National Gallery, London.
Sol Cejas, SOAP, project dossier, 2026. ALTAR is a proposed work.