Mirror, Mirror
What shine does to an object, in installation and brand experience
There is a boombox covered in tiny mirrors that has already passed through two of my works. In Haus of Luna it sat in the white room, near the mirrored Virgin Mary. In ALTAR, one of the pieces of SOAP, it appears on a silver pedestal among a miniature of the Obelisco of Buenos Aires, a figurine of Mafalda, the Argentine comic-strip girl, and televisions playing the VHS tapes of my childhood. It is an ordinary boombox, with round speakers and antennas. The mosaic kept its shape and raised its rank.
In Buenos Aires, little mirrors have a bad reputation. To sell someone espejitos de colores, little colored mirrors, is to fool them with something shiny and worthless. The expression carries a schoolbook image of the conquest: mirrors and glass beads traded for gold. I use that same material to give an object presence, to raise it. The contradiction makes me ask what shine actually does, when it consecrates and when it deceives.
My answer is that shine consecrates when it lets you see what it covers. The boombox is still a boombox, recognizable from across the room. What changed is the place it holds in the space 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 returning the room: the floor, the wall, the lamp, whoever walks by. In the right light its volume blends into its surroundings, and what remains visible is the environment in the shape of a box. A mosaic works differently. The joints between tiles draw a grid that holds the form, and on a curved surface each tile sits at a slightly different angle. The object stays there, recognizable, while the light breaks into hundreds of points that travel across its surface and scatter onto the walls.
Format matters too. Larger, uniform tiles evoke something different from small pieces laid as a mosaic or following a curve. A grid of large, even tiles leans toward the dance floor; a fine mosaic that follows a curve leans closer to jewelry. Like the size of a cut in a collage, each choice changes what the object says before anyone is reflected in it.
That is why I choose mirror mosaic, what stores sell as disco tile. It enhances an object without stealing its spotlight, and at the same time it owns its presence: a mirrored object does not apologize for shining. It doesn't compete with the room either. It completes it, returning fragments of everything around it.
What interests me most is that the mosaic holds time. What it reflects depends on the light, your position and the moment. In the morning it returns one thing; at night, under a warm lamp, another. Step a couple of feet to the side and every fragment changes. Two people standing in front of the same object at the same second see two different objects, because each tile returns a piece of the room from their own angle. The object is one; the image belongs to whoever is looking. An object covered in small mirrors behaves like a small constellation: a fixed body surrounded by points of light that shift with where you stand.
This happens with any mirror, and I see it in my own home. In the bathroom there is an enormous white wall that I covered with gold-framed mirrors. Beyond how they look, what I care about is what they reflect: one thing when I wash my hands, another when I'm sitting down, and from there you can now see parts of the living room that never reached the bathroom before. 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 a monochrome white room with a disco ball. A mirrored Virgin is not the same as a plain one. Not all of them need to be like this, but that decision showed her from another side: why couldn't she have a little glamour? And it was more than glamour. So much shine gave her divinity; it made her magical. The mosaic brought her closer to the dance floor while giving back the radiance that has always surrounded sacred images.
Behind her, oval rings of white neon surrounded her like a mandorla, the almond of light that Christian iconography draws around sacred figures. I wanted to give her that lift, a sacred aura with something spatial about it. The pedestal was covered in mirror tiles too, repeating the rings in fragments. Both formats lived in the same piece: the mosaic followed the folds of her mantle, and the base was an even grid.
The combination mattered. As in collage, context changes the meaning of a piece, and so does its placement. The same mirrored Virgin in the red kitchen would have told another story. From that kitchen, the doorframe cut out the white room like a picture within a picture, and the Virgin appeared at the far end, surrounded by light.
This closeness between the sacred and shine has a long history. In medieval churches, the gold grounds of religious paintings were seen by candlelight, which gave the gold a flickering depth: the figures seemed to float in a glow. In Iran, ayeneh-kari, a traditional technique that sets fragments of mirror into plaster, lines entire shrine interiors. For the Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, the mirrored interior of the Shah Cheragh shrine in Shiraz was the starting point for bringing mirror mosaic into contemporary sculpture. The Guggenheim in New York gathered that work in a retrospective in 2015.
Even the word keeps the connection. Glamour appears in early eighteenth-century Scots meaning a spell, and it is an altered form of grammar: in the Scotland of that time, book learning blurred into occult learning. Walter Scott carried it into general English, and only around 1840 did it begin to name an alluring beauty. Before it named Hollywood stars, it named a spell.
What interests me 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 kept her condition as a religious image and gained a way of being in the room that also belongs to the night, the dance floor and the diva.
Looking for Yourself in the Fragments
Beyond light, the mosaic returns pieces of whoever is looking: an eye, half a mouth, the color of a T-shirt, spread across hundreds of tiles. In front of a mirrored object, a person sees themselves in fragments, folded into the object's surface and into the room around it. We are part of a thousand little mirrors.
Looking for yourself among the fragments is also a way of discovering yourself. Several mirrors at once show angles of ourselves we rarely see, a profile or a gesture we didn't know we made, and they make us assemble the image from pieces that arrive out of order.
In the red kitchen of Haus of Luna, where the refrigerator was covered in small mirrors, someone told me they had felt like a diva. That was what I wanted for that room. I read it as a sign that glamour transfers: the shine I gave an object ended up reaching the person using it.
Lacan described the mirror stage as the moment when a child who does not yet command its body jubilantly recognizes itself in a whole image. That image anticipates a unity the body does not yet have, and its reverse is what he called the fragmented body. A mirror mosaic returns something closer to that reverse: the body in pieces. I still wonder whether part of the glamour comes from there, from a mirror that doesn't assemble you whole and, for that very reason, lets you play at being someone else.
In Seminar XI, Lacan returns to Holbein's The Ambassadors, painted in 1533: a distorted skull crosses the floor of the scene and only becomes legible when the viewer steps to one side. Some things can only be seen from one position. A mirrored object extends that condition across its entire surface, because every step the viewer takes changes what appears.
That is the difference from the selfie wall, a device repeated across so many brand activations. The selfie wall places you whole in front of a backdrop, and the experience goes into the phone. The mosaic puts you inside the object, in pieces, and to see yourself you have to move. The body works, and attention stays in the room.
When Shine Deceives
Shine can also distract, and the idiom about little colored mirrors is right to be suspicious. At the 1966 Venice Biennale, Yayoi Kusama installed Narcissus Garden: 1,500 silver plastic spheres on the lawn, which she sold for two dollars each beside a sign that read “YOUR NARCISSIUM [sic] FOR SALE.” Biennale officials stopped the sales. Kusama staged the commercial side of reflection: what people were buying was the chance to see themselves.
A brand faces the same tension every time it covers something in shine. It can raise a product or bury it in effect. The reasons I choose mosaic help tell one from the other. The first is whether the product is still recognizable under the shine, because when the coating erases the form, the shine becomes the product. The second is whether the reflection changes with the hour, the light and the viewer, or works like a still photo that is used up in a single glance. The third is where the visitor ends up: inside the object, part of the brand for a while, or in front of a backdrop that turns the brand into scenery.
Before all of that comes the choice of mirror. Flat, mosaic, large tiles, curved, framed or with color film: each produces a different reflection and asks something different of the visitor. In Haus of Luna I used many mirrors with color film, which tint what they return and make the room and the person appear at another temperature. For a brand, choosing the mirror is as decisive as choosing the color.
There is one more thing I find valuable for any brand experience. Brands invest heavily in personalization: data, screens, sensors that recognize each visitor. A mirror mosaic gives each person a different image through physics alone, without asking for any data. It is analog personalization, and it has existed for centuries.
Argentum
In ALTAR, shine goes one step further. The whole ensemble is finished in silver: a central obelisk modeled on the Obelisco of Buenos Aires, Mafalda, the number 60 bus, a penguin-shaped wine pitcher, a soda siphon, a mate gourd, a plate of empanadas and CRT televisions playing family videos. The silver evens out objects from different scales and registers and gives them a single condition. Argentum, the Latin word for silver, is the root of the name Argentina. In this work, which exists today as a proposal, the shine carries the name of a country.
Among those objects the boombox covered in small mirrors appears again, the same one that sat beside the Virgin in the white room of Haus of Luna. Here it returns another light, another position and another moment, and therefore another image. It is still a boombox, anyone can recognize it, and its rank has changed again.
That is what I ask of shine, whether on a Virgin, a refrigerator or a brand's product: that it raise what it covers without hiding it. And I ask something more of the mirror. A mirror puts whoever is looking in relation to the space: it draws them closer, makes them step aside, look for their face among the fragments, discover a corner of the room they hadn't seen. There, perception, the question that runs through my work, becomes an action. In front of a mirror, looking means moving, and every movement reveals another version of the place and of the person looking. //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.