Hall of Mirrors

I often feel like I am made of glass, handling a delicate life many romanticize or misunderstand, leaving me with ambivalence towards relating to people. Autistic women were historically misdiagnosed with a broken brain or a mental illness, seen as unfixable or limited instead of having a different cognitive mother tongue. Neuroscientists believe the initial dysfunction comes from the Mirror Neuron System, the part of the brain that manages perception and understanding, where brain cells react to send information about particular actions performed or observed. Autistics cannot depend on this system because the pathways of connection are inhibited, causing developmental barriers and learning deficiencies, inability to mirror perfectly, causing dysregulation of the central nervous system. Broken mirrors are deemed useless because they do not omit a perfect reflection, even the event of breaking a mirror carries superstitions or beliefs of bad luck. This observation led me to create a new practice and series of works called “Hall of Mirrors” reshaping perspectives and demystifying autism, seeing beyond circumstantial limitations and giving new purpose to broken things— procuring steps to self-love and self-reflection that labels fail to discern. My practice unmasks my coping strategies (autistic masking, oppressing less desirable traits to conform with societal expectation) that disrupt the way self-reflection is experienced. I have transformed stimming habits (or self regulatory behavior) into creation methods. I need cross-disciplinary techniques to fully embrace a combining of the senses. They are joints, ligaments or tendons supporting my vision rather than crutches to manage dysfunction. I form what I call “Digital Impressionism,” bending light and sculpting frequency to create environments, a unique and unconventional language between visual and digital art mediums. Hall of Mirrors is an expansion of the polarizing inner world of autism, retracting itself from standard methods of visual art and augmented reality (AR) applications. 10 mirror sculptures and 10 photo-realistic 3D renders of the mirrors are accompanied by unique animations and sound environments. My interactive exhibition can creatively utilize any gallery space while a virtual tour in a digitized hyper-realistic space online is created in parallel for full digital access. This series becomes a moving reflection, encouraging minds to hold both nuance and polarity as a bridge towards deeper understanding of the inner self in relation to what is outside of normal peripherals. Capturing this series through my neurodivergent perspectives, I highlight that what the eye perceives and what the brain understands are different.