Hall of Mirrors, a photographic art exhibition on display at the Northlight Gallery, will open its doors this week.

There will be an opening reception for the exhibition at the gallery tonight at 7 p.m.

Elizabeth Allen, faculty associate in the School of Art and director of the Northlight Gallery, organized the exhibition.

Allen teaches an upper-division photography class. A few years ago, she and her class examined feminist art and what that term meant at the time, she said.

The class found that many feminist photographic artists were working with self-portraiture, which prompted Allen to embark on coordinating the Hall of Mirrors exhibition.

Allen pooled together seven artists: Jen Davis, Suzanne Szucs, Liz Cohen, Wilka Roig, Min Kim Park and Mary Coble, who all approach the subject — themselves — from different directions, using various techniques.

Green used a photographic process called “ambrotype,” in which a photograph is developed on glass. The pieces on display come from her “Character Recognition Series.”

Szucs’s “Journal, In Progress” is a collection of 5,500 Polaroid images of herself she took every day for 15 years, although only a portion of those are at the gallery.

Szuc started the journal when she was in graduate school to catalogue the day-to-day changes she was going through, and soon found the photographs to be more than she intended, she said.

Szuc found that her day-to-day experiences touched on issues of self identity, the body and how people identify themselves through the people in our lives.

“It became sort of a commentary on photography and photography’s role in shaping how we identify ourselves,” Szuc said.

Park features “Perfect Asian Woman,” a video and audio piece in which she overlays her image with images of other Asian women she has interviewed.

Park said that “Perfect Asian Woman” examines the portrayal of immigrant Asian women and how American culture perceives them.

Hers is a very personal piece, she said, because she immigrated to the U.S. from Seoul, South Korea where she worked as a journalist for Korean News Daily and went to study art at the University of New Mexico.

“This piece extends from my personal experiences and addresses larger issues in gender, race and stereotyping,” Park said.

M. Woodlee, a photography undergraduate, helped to assemble the pieces in the gallery and said he admired the artist’s fearlessness in assigning themselves to be their own subjects.

He said self-portraiture is an interesting way to put yourself out there because everyone can walk away with a different interpretation.

“I think that [we] as photographers photograph ourselves as how we view ourselves, and we try to put that into the image for other people to view,” Woodlee said.

Women as a whole have been the subject of art since the beginning of time, though most of that art was made through the lens of men, Allen said.

She said the Hall of Mirrors exhibition gives female artists the chance to create images of themselves.

“How does a woman want to present herself and make decisions about how she’s presented rather than just being looked at?” Allen said.
All these issues are addressed in this exhibition.”

Reach the reporter at brian.bahe@asu.edu.