project image
Danielle Freakley
MIRROR MAN & NAKED MAN PLAY ROCK PAPER SCISSORS

first performed on March 17, 2017
Flux Factory, Queens, NY
performed once in 2017

HEATHER KAPPLOW

Risa Troy

Boston, MA / Eindhoven, Netherlands

heatherkapplow.com / risatroy.com

MIRROR MAN & NAKED MAN PLAY ROCK PAPER SCISSORS
HEATHER KAPPLOW

“Mirror Man & Naked Man Play Rock Paper Scissors” was developed especially for an exhibition called The Endless and Mobile Beautiful Collapsible Labyrinth, which involved art hung and performed on a multitude of surfaces, in a space with rolling and reconfigurable walls, that nested within one another. The piece posited the ever-changing gallery space as a social media space, where myself and another performer, Risa Troy, dressed as and performed the role of two characters (a pair of social media “friends”) in constant interaction with each other and the other activities happening in the space during the exhibition’s closing event. As people often do on social media, we silently lurked and observed the activities of others in the gallery, and then, whenever we encountered one another in our navigation of the space, we faced each other directly—one of us dressed in mirrors, the other in an outfit with corresponding holes cut out of it to reveal the naked body underneath—and played a three vigorous rounds of the game Rock, Paper, Scissors. The project was billed as “a gestural duet about social media echo chambers, inspired by Facebook’s algorithms, and by the work of Georgiy Daneliya and Vladislav Surkov.” It did not resolve any problems.