In Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s new photographs, there is no mistaking where we are: Camera tripods stand like machinic bodies, studio lights cast their lurid shine upon things, and the walls are busy with what appear to be the artist’s photo prints. The fourth wall between the photographer’s studio and the art gallery has come down, and we are peering into the womb from which images are born.
Such disclosures are the animating principle behind the 13 photographs on view in “Trance,” Sepuya’s second show at Bortolami Gallery in TriBeCa. Shot with digital cameras, Sepuya’s scenes depict the process of image-making, revealing his world of cameras, curtains and other equipment. Sepuya also turns his incisive lens upon the realm his pictures enter once they leave the studio; seven images in the show were taken in the very gallery in which they are on display. Our own space of viewing is reflected back at us.
Sepuya, 43, became a force in the photo world after the 2019 Whitney Biennial. He is known for his meticulous interrogation of photography, using myriad techniques to explore how images are constructed — an inquiry that leads, ultimately, to an exploration of seeing itself.
Mirrors and other reflective surfaces mediate the view of the camera, opening up a world of layered reflections. In “Photographing (DSF4950),” a man reflected in a mirror holds a camera to his eye, and it is as if we are being photographed; a sliver of his back is shown in another mirror. On the wall behind him is a framed photograph by Sepuya in which a pair of embracing arms holds another camera, creating an echo of images inside images.
The result, which demands a visual deciphering that is both delightful and maddening, recalls art-historical traditions, including Velázquez’s celebrated “Las Meninas,” in which the king and queen of Spain, whom the artist is painting, appear in a mirror behind him. It also calls to mind contemporary work, like Jeff Wall’s “Picture for Women,” which shows Wall at work in his studio gazing at the subject he is photographing.
But Sepuya’s images do more than invite the viewer behind the scenes. They become an instrument with which the artist, with forensic precision and delicate vulnerability, dissects the inner life of his medium.
Sepuya’s previous work in the Whitney Biennial, as well as his 2019 solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, lavished attention on the body and its expressions of queer desire (in particular, his own body in intimate positions with friends and lovers). In “Trance,” however, many of the photographs seem to be absent of people. At times, this specificity of attention, to the medium of photography, can begin to feel repetitive and limited.
But the mystery in Sepuya’s photographs keeps this seriality interesting. For example, when Sepuya’s body does come into view, his presence is uncertain. In “Night Studio Mirror (DSF1073),” Sepuya makes use of double exposure, rendering the contours of his body a blurred rush. In “Gallery Mirror (DSCF1114),” “Gallery Gazing Ball” and “Gallery Gazing Ball Negative,” shot inside Bortolami, we see only his hands. Elsewhere, he appears as a barely discernible reflection. The artist’s presence becomes an unstable fact, or even an unresolvable question.
Another clever and strange optical contrivance recurs in “Trance”: mirrored gazing balls. In them, we glimpse distended, fish-eye-like reflections of the studio or the gallery, redoubling and widening our view. It is almost as if we’ve gained a third eye. In “Gazing Ball Position 02 (DSF2658)” and “Gallery Gazing Ball Negative,” the balls sit atop tripods, as if ready to capture us. It’s an almost uncanny substitution: It seems this other device for looking has usurped the camera.
“Gallery Gazing Ball Negative,” which depicts the empty interior of Bortolami and its cavernous reflection in the gazing ball, involves another kind of revelation: the photographic negative. Here, and in three other negative images in the show, Sepuya brings to the surface the technical foundations that lie beneath the developed picture.
The triumph of the show is “Studio Mirror Diptych (DSF3596 ),” an architectonic photo-installation mounted on a wheeled frame called a mobile flat, a device Sepuya often uses to mount mirrors in his studio. A series of self-reflexive maneuvers unfolds from there: A mobile flat almost identical to one in the gallery appears in the right panel of the diptych, as if the very object before us lives in the image itself. This view is reflected in a free-standing mirror in the left panel. The entire scene is shot in a different mirror, textured with smudges and dirt, in which we see part of Sepuya’s reflection behind the camera.
In this diptych the construction of the image and its reception — the studio and the gallery — bleed together. The universe inside the frame and the one beyond its edge seem to swallow each other, and the act of looking at an image slowly folds into the feeling of being a part of it.
Trance
Through March 6, Bortolami Gallery, 39 Walker Street, Manhattan; 212-727-2050, bortolamigallery.com.
