Mirror Mirror: The Reflective Surface in Contemporary Art Published in November by Thames & Hudson, Dr.Michael Petry surveys the work of contemporary artists working with reflections.

"David Van Eyssen was a well known new media creator when he became ill. He has said that ‘During several years of cancer treatment, I took photographs of myself with my phone, recording surgeries and side-effects, and using the camera to confirm my existence.’ In recovery, he has gone on to explore his self portraiture practice. For his series, A Slim Volume of Poetry In No Particular Order, he temporarily installed and broke large mirrors across Los Angeles. These startling works hide as much as document, and the viewer must work hard to seek him out. The violence stilled in the fractured image has a clear bodily parallel. Using AI techniques in DisAppearance, sections around the edges of four self portraits were extended until the figures recede into an imagined vista."

Don't You Wish You Were On The Other Side of The Glass is a collection of photographs of the witnessing self, taken over a two year period in London and Los Angeles.

"I wanted this series of pictures to act as bridge between street photography and self portraiture.

For many of the images, I’m looking for ways to block or erase parts of my face and body because I want to move away from conventional self-portraiture as much as possible, and because I’m interested in the transformation of the self, and how to communicate that visually. The window surface, and how light strikes it, is key to this, and so the texture of the glass is important — how clean or weathered it is, or whether it’s been graffitied on.

In other images, while there's usually some distortion of the face or figure — even the appearance of amputation in some cases — it’s more about the space, and where the subject stands in it. That tells us something else about the figure — how present or distant it is. Reflecting the street into the area behind the window creates a liminal space, and the entire image becomes the subject. I think of these photographs as containing a figure, not self-portraits that makes the figure the subject.”

Always Departing, Returning Again is an installation video work that explores the plasticity of time. As direction, duration, and orientation of the images fluctuates, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine which direction the passenger is traveling in. Memories of the passenger, in the form of shadow images, intersect with the sequence on the train, adding a dimension of unconscious time.