REVERSALS August 22 - October 4, 2025
To live in a time of reversal is to feel the floor tilt, the sky shift, the ordinary bearings turn strange. The planet has done this before. Around 42,000 years ago, the poles came close to swapping places. Scientists call it the Laschamp Excursion. Although the name sounds like a hike in the French countryside; in truth it was a planetary unravelling. The magnetic field faltered, auroras burned across equatorial skies, climates lurched. For the humans alive then, life’s coordinates were scrambled. And in that altered light, the alien climate may have prompted dramatic changes in early human behavior—including the emergence of symbolic art found etched into rock or drawn in caves, possibly from our ancestors sheltering from radiation and climatic disorder.
In the midst of our own recent upheaval—the COVID-19 pandemic—giant kauri trees were uncovered during construction in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Their growth rings carried the memory of that ancient reversal, radiation etched in the rings of the living wood. These time machines in tree form witnessed an event that once rewrote the planet’s script.
For Couper and Russ, and others whose first sky was the Southern Hemisphere’s, the idea of reversal is not only historical or geographical—it’s lived. The sun rises on the wrong side. The constellations are rearranged. Time feels a little bent.
Our current exhibition brings together works from the CouperRuss collection alongside contemporary artists with Las Vegas connections who work in that tilted space. Their reversals aren’t tricks of the eye so much as ways of thinking—flips, mirrors, distortions that unsettle what we take for granted. Here, turning an image upside down can make it more legible. And sometimes, the most revealing view is the one we get when “the right way up” is suspended, and the world shows us another face.
PLATES
Photography—one of the great image-making tools of modernity—is itself a medium of reversal. Early photographic images were viewed by the photographer as an upside down image in the camera’s viewfinder. The ability to produce mirror images with film created a new way to view vistas. Also, in early photography—whether it be an ambrotype, tintype or daguerreotype—the surface provided the void of black to help create the contrast in the image. Many works in REVERSALS operate within this same perceptual space—asking the viewer to look again, to notice what was previously unseen, to experience the instability of their own gaze. Ben Cauchi’s contemporary take on the tintype evokes both 19th-century spirit photography and present day unheimlich uncertainty: a conical form floats in a black field, suspended between abstraction and apparition. Manuel Ocampo’s monotype of an addled female form surrounded by the blackness of night, has a mask in the shape of a cross pattée. Goya-esque wings vaporize into a pentimenti of the inky surface. The technique of monotype is one of wiping away areas of ink on a polished plate to create highlights. A gesture of finding chiaroscuro with a solvent soaked brush and a rag.
I’LL BE YOUR MIRROR
JK Russ’ photograph of Aotearoa artist Kiri costumed with feline ears is mirrored alongside a skewed, diagonal image of an actual cat with claws out. The duplication is playful and surreal—yet the mirror introduces an uncanny break. Who is the subject, and who is the echo? Tom Umholtz’s abstracted skull undulates as it rotates to create a tessellated form on a craquelure field. The nod to memento mori is heightened to be a multiplicity of mirrors to reflect the chaos of contemporary life. Tony de Lautour’s cut and torn cardboard box sculpture features a colonial soldier on one side and a native bird on the other. Fragile, makeshift and loaded, the work suggests a collapsing of national mythologies: the imperial becomes disposable; the native returns, ghostlike, on the reverse.
PAINTING SABATTIERS
Armand Sabattier’s photographic solarizing technique has been co-opted and returned to photography’s predecessor painting in Wilhelmus C. Ruifrok and Maryrose Crook’s works. Ruifrok’s small painting presents a portrait rendered in inverted color: a blue-skinned man, glowing like an afterimage. The colors resist realism; they ask us to see the subject as an inverted, blinking memory. Crook’s similarly solarized figure sits between presence and eclipse, as if printed with light from another spectrum. Based on family photographs, the conflation of a portrait and a still life begin to undulate and metamorphose into pareidolia: unintentional forms and faces reveal themselves after a period of looking.
INVERSION AS CRITIQUE
Several artists in the show reverse more than just imagery—they flip narratives, symbols, and histories. Andrew McLeod, Lane Sheehy, Georg Baselitz and Matthew Couper employ white lines on a black, inverting the conventions of drawing. Their works feel like diagrams or messages from a reversed dimension: mysterious, graphic, instructional, yet dislocated. McLeod’s digitally manipulated magpie collection of forms in an interior space defy gravity and scale—the composition divided horizontally with canvases within canvases. Sheehy’s low brow handmade hoarding is a humorous ersatz advertisement for a convenience corporation based in the Hague. Baselitz’s Alder, or eagle, is printed as an upside-down woodcut in a canonical example of his reversal aesthetics. Baselitz inverts his subjects to prevent straight-forward identification, forcing the viewer to confront the image on formal terms before symbolic ones. The eagle, a traditional emblem of power, becomes awkward, vulnerable—stripped of its grandeur. Although printed in the early 80’s, Baselitz perhaps demonstrates foresight into contemporary political issues in this stark image. Couper reinterprets Albrecht Dürer’s famous print Melencolia I reversing the image—both with a tonal inversion and mirroring—returning the image back to how Dürer would’ve been looking at the original printing plate while engraving it 500 years ago.
MASS AND CHAOS
Philip Guston’s Summer, reads as a symbol of seasonal tidings represented by an innocent stack of cherries, but the hoard of rotating spheres with both flaccid and erect wicks lie in an awaiting cluster, ready to be detonated. John McVay’s Found Sound adds a layered twist: 10 faces interlocked, each battling between line and flat shape, printed in atmospheric blues. Tear drops defy gravity. The result is a shifting, ambiguous configuration—a Möbius strip of identity, symmetry, and dissolution loosely tied together with cassette tape, a nod to McVay’s work as a noise artist. Ever since Alastair Galbraith formed his first band The Rip in 1981, he has incorporated backmasking as an integral sound component to his compositions. Forty years later, his most recent release Lagash demonstrates deft subtleties of the technique in the track Bakunin, named after the Russian revolutionary anarchist. Galbraith’s backmasking technique was at its height during the turn of the 21st century, exemplified in two albums Cry (2000) and the aptly titled Mirrorwork (1998).
SEEING AGAIN
In REVERSALS, inversion is not just visual—it is epistemological. These artists ask us to question what we think we know. They remind us that a world flipped upside down may reveal truths the right-way-up world conceals.
SEEING AGAIN
In REVERSALS, inversion is not just visual—it is epistemological. These artists ask us to question what we think we know. They remind us that a world flipped upside down may reveal truths the right-way-up world conceals.
This is not just a metaphor for our time—it’s also a possible diagnosis. In an age of disinformation, polarization, and planetary instability, the sense of reversal is everywhere: political swings, climate collapse, magnetic metaphors made real. But through the lens of art, reversal can also be a strategy of survival—a way to reclaim attention, break open meaning, and rewire perception.
Just as the ancient kauri trees silently registered a cataclysm that reshaped the planet, the works in REVERSALS mark disturbances—personal, political, and cosmic. They speak in mirrored tones, flipped signals, and inverted maps. And they invite us not just to look, but to look differently.
