i stage and photograph my fantasies about reationship reflections of one with himself....between sexes...among people.
The Mirror's Lament ...by Gary Indiana, Sept. 2004
Michael Maytal's photographs recast the myth of Narcissus as a circuit of more formidable misunderstandings than the mere confusion of the self with its reflected image. Narcissus believes his mirrored form to be someone else's. He falls in love with himself while imagining that he is someone else.
What Maytal's figures find in mirrors may also be themselves, but his pictures present this encounter in ways that literally reflect the dark transactions of the self with its shifting perceptions of its image. Whether what looks back from the mirror is the picture of a wish or an apprehension, or something else altogether, Maytal leaves for the viewer to determine.
The thing in the mirror, in one way or another, erases the person looking at it. The figures are often arranged as if rehearsing a ceremony, or planning its mise-en-scene, its costumes, its lighting effects. It could plausibly be a ritual culminating in penetration, orgasm, or for that matter cloning, an indecipherable narrative event that involves masks, concealment, lubricity, and some unknowable thing held in reserve, a secret both people and objects keep hidden behind their surfaces.
There are specific references to birth, a shattered egg large enough to have hatched a human being, formal arrangements of flesh that provoke thoughts of genetic tampering, engineered bodies. Maytal's tableaux could be documents of a science experiment in the service of a fantastic eroticism, a sexuality involving the redesign of the organism for better fit--or, in some cases, an unfortunate tampering with nature. The color scheme is usually muted, cool, a spectrum of grays and whites and bluish industrial tones, not quite the harsh coldness of laboratory or morgue; the crisp contours of objects in space echo the pleats and folds of bodies, bodies mimic the stasis of things.
And sometimes Maytal's subjects appear disengaged from the constructed space that frames them, caught in a moment of solitary rapture, a flickering reverie, a frozen glance of longing or contemplation. The dark river of time flows inside a totally private expression, like the question posed to eternity in the unblinking stare of an owl. |
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