Poetics of Structure
Photography and text by Anna Sulikowska
Marco Jacob has marvelled at mirrors and surfaces since his childhood’s la piedra de espejo, the mirror-rock. Like an angel from Wings of Desire, he swiftly wanders through the city and observes, often journeys on his bizarre bicycle, from one meeting to another. He sometimes wanders along Lake Ontario to look at its alluring surface, as well as at the white swans that live in it… Finding solitude and contemplation in his idiosyncratic music, film and book archive hidden away in Parkdale. He is an artful architect from the future.
It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Room 214 at The Gladstone Hotel was booked for the weekend. Atelier Jacob set up its novelty: a temporary locus, a poetic interpretation of Oscar Wilde’s quote, an architectural statement; conceived in accord by the means of available light, mirrored acrylic panels, pixilated pegboard and white surfaces of building materials.
Smoke and Mirrors, like a portrait of a woman, who possesses a distilled mechanic soul inhabiting her body, with rational features that make up her pure face, by way of an intricate light that falls across her pale iris and dilates her pupils, she looked at and beyond the audience.
It is not surprising then that the enclosed contraption of room 214 perpetuated a mixed response in the viewers. Some loved her, wanting to stay and look her in the eye. Others disliked her, wanting to leave her gaze due to uncanny feelings of vertigo. She watched the audience with her five transient mirrored pupils, giving a certain rhythm to the reflections and confusing the viewers by denying a distinct focal point as they swarmed, shifted and moved, individually or in groups, from one standpoint to another, in a play of refractions, distortions and perspectives of dilating and constricting shapes. Smoke and Mirrors, like a brilliant star, shone on the inside in all of her splendor, beyond the walls of the hotel room.
Her observant creator, the Lima-born Toronto-based architect Marco Jacob, emulated the experience from studying tactile structures, ephemeral qualities of light and movement of human figures in space. He maneuvered the intricate essence of architecture in a minimal gesture, perhaps alluding to la piedra de espejo, the mirror-rock from his days of youth.
A dark vestibular hallway, like an inconspicuous invitation which showed the way to the anterior chamber of Smoke and Mirrors, right into her heart, laid in the last distant room anticipating invitees. Where, suspended between an irregular grid of white walls and mirrors, the daylight poured through the window and diffused through a membranous wall, as though through a large soft medusoid. Where, three mirrors covering adjacent walls and two further mirrors covering the ceiling and the floor, emulated a feeling of being in a swimming pool. “With no ocean or river, whose landbound indigenous population [the audience] had never mastered the science of navigating on light” , the viewers were floating on or sinking in the light to the distant sounds of faint music beyond the walls.
I usually look in the mirrored surfaces glimpsing at my reflection – “they [the mirrors] let one pass through the surface of things.” However, this time everything else [not me] required my careful attention. I forgot about my mirror image, studying the falsity of perception and the certainty of experience, in an attempt to find a focal point, while the dejected pupils stared back with an energy that evoked a feeling of severe hyper-existence. The space seemed to vibrate and spin in an invigorating motion. The eye, like a bird, wandered aimlessly as though trying to look past the blind spots and distant/immediate objects, not knowing where to place itself, fluttering over the disorienting trap-like epicenter – to finally fix itself on a detail, a shadow, silhouette, a streak. Or, to follow a line of many reflected converging lines as in a delicate drawing that continued to an infinite end.
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