Reflections in a Three-Way Mirror // Jon Davies
An interpretive essay on Three Way Mirror an exhibition by Daniel Barrow, Glenn Gear, and Paige Gratland, written by Jon Davies.
Three Way Mirror is the collaboration of three queer artists from across Canada born in the 1970s – Daniel Barrow, Glenn Gear and Paige Gratland – who first connected in 2018 over a shared commitment to craft and ways of making like hand-drawn animation, sewing, weaving, leatherwork, beading, and paper dolls. Three Way Mirror continues their artistic collaboration at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, exploring the intimacies and negotiations that arise from working creatively and exhibiting together, in queer friendship.
The “homo” in “homosexuality” signifies “same, identical” while the “hetero” in “heterosexuality” signifies “different, other.” The figure of Narcissus has long been a queer touchstone: as recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the beautiful youth Narcissus catches a glimpse of himself and becomes enraptured with his own reflection to the point that he wastes away and dies. It can be seen as a cautionary tale against unchecked self-regard and, literally, self-reflection. The story tells us that a mirror is dangerous because you might fall in love with your own reflection; it is also dangerous because you might believe the reflection is you, rather than just an image of you. But you are not reducible to an image.
“A three-way mirror renders the self as other. Metaphorically, it suggests a third way, a means of escape from binary ways of thinking about gender (male/female), depth vs. surface, the individual vs. the collective, and even the dichotomy of living and dead.”
While a two-way mirror allows the looker to look at someone else without being seen themselves, a three-way mirror encloses the looker inside multiple reflections of themself. It creates an uneasily heightened level of self-reflection, one that is disorienting rather than ensnaring. The angled mirrors enable you to see the sides and back of your face or body, to see yourself from perspectives you normally cannot hold, namely the points-of-view that others have of you. A three-way mirror renders the self as other. Metaphorically, it suggests a third way, a means of escape from binary ways of thinking about gender (male/female), depth vs. surface, the individual vs. the collective, and even the dichotomy of living and dead. Looking through a three-way mirror offers a refracted view, opening up new and different ways of thinking about creativity, labour, friendship, and how we make/show art.
The celebrated Canadian queer artist group General Idea, made up of AA Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal, looked at the world through a three-way mirror. In one of several group portraits, Baby Makes 3 (1984), the three men are airbrushed to look uncannily childlike, tucked into a huge bed floating against a heavenly sky. The title is misleading because they are all babies; there is no way of discerning generations because there are no parents and therefore no rules to inherit. In coming together, the trio made their own rules, and one was that all decisions about their joint artistic practice were made by consensus.
Triangles are considered a “strong” shape; they can withstand a lot of pressure and weight, as in the construction of a bridge. Triangulation is a concept from psychology that holds that a two-person relationship is unstable and therefore communication often gets mediated – triangulated – by a third party, a child for example. I learn a term coined by psychotherapist Jay Haley, “The Perverse Triangle,” which sets my imagination spinning. Threesomes disrupt the couple form that is so heavily mythologized as to reign (still!) as our primary image of romantic love. During the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, the home was returned to the place of sanctity, security and innocence that it was once believed to hold. Safe. Queer people know that the home can be a place of conformity and abuse, of destructive power dynamics and their reproduction. During the pandemic, you had to stay home. If your sexual/social life revolved around strangers, you had to remain alone. There was no urgency to return us to the streets or to the arms of strangers, forms of intimate life that are devalued: we were reminded that the couple, the family, was what truly mattered.
In Canada, when you decide you want to go into the arts, you quickly learn that you will not make it on your own. The market, the institutions, the press are so small that you will not survive materially or emotionally without the care and support of people around you. And not only friends but near-strangers, all those who’ve made a similar decision to live in this precarious way – because of the freedoms it allows – and are doing their part to hold this fragile ecosystem afloat. As you get older, living as an artist can feel ever more impossible, but you are not alone. There is so much shame around relying on the help of lovers, friends and community to get by, the fear of being a burden. Working in collaboration is a small gesture of normalising the unshameful insufficiency of the individual surviving this world.
“Queer community – or really any community, large or small – can only endure if it can abide difference rather than seek a false harmony, if it is based on an oft-uncomfortable kinship.”
Writing about Andy Warhol’s studio, the Factory, as a vital site of artistic and social mixing, Douglas Crimp explains that here “the self finds itself not through its identification or dis-identification with others, but in its singularity among all the singular things of the world. [It] is a coming together to stay apart; it maintains both the self and the other in their fund-amental distinctiveness, a distinctiveness that is for me the radical meaning of queer.” Queer community – or really any community, large or small – can only endure if it can abide difference rather than seek a false harmony, if it is based on an oft-uncomfortable kinship.
Collaboration demands embracing risk over safety, trust over separation, and the social over the individual; it acknowledges that we are never in full control over who we are – autonomy is a myth – but need other people both to shape ourselves and to mirror us back to ourselves. Three Way Mirror’s approach opens each of the artists involved to see their own work through two other’s eyes, to notice and appreciate qualities or details in their colleagues’ work that they would not have seen themselves. Art looks and feels different when it is made alongside friends, and exhibiting three artists’ work together refracts shared ideas or concerns through multiple points of view, bouncing them off one another.
“Craft returns people to their bodies; it is about physical touch, patience, rhythm, and learning close at hand with others. It is about reaching for something bigger than oneself, tapping into generational legacies that cry out to be kept going.”
Three Way Mirror came together through a keen interest in craft and the handmade, in queer and other lineages and legacies, and in images that move. Making and exhibiting as a kind of chosen family means negotiating through conflict, finding compromise and not always getting what you want. These are valuable skills for life, especially at a time when it feels like the social fabric is being torn asunder. It will be painful but worth it to re-socialise ourselves, learn to tolerate true difference and work through disagreement rather than simply reject or dehumanise the other. Craft returns people to their bodies; it is about physical touch, patience, rhythm, and learning close at hand with others. It is about reaching for something bigger than oneself, tapping into generational legacies that cry out to be kept going. To work this way demands sitting with rather than rushing to resolve discomfort and being porous to the world in all its rough edges; I can’t help but see this as a queer cultural practice more aligned with Barrow, Gear and Gratland’s pre-Internet, Gen X comings-of-age than to our current moment. They hold a deep but under-appreciated queer knowledge of ways of connecting, creating and living that predates the Big Tech interfaces that divide us and the screens that reflect false images of us back to ourselves.
Jon Davies is a curator, writer and independent scholar from Montreal, Canada. He recently received his PhD in Art History from Stanford University. He was previously Assistant Curator at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto (2008–12) and Associate Curator at Oakville Galleries (2012–15). His book about Paul Morrissey’s 1970 film ‘Trash’ was published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2009 and his edited anthology ‘More Voice-Over: Colin Campbell Writings’ was published by Concordia University Press in 2021. His writing has been published in numerous anthologies, catalogues, journals, and periodicals over the past two decades. In 2023, he co-curated the 68th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, “Queer World-Mending,” with artist Steve Reinke.