Mirror/Mirror Stirling Photography Festival Exhibition

Mirror / Mirror is an exhibition that brings together three artists based in Scotland who have graduated over the last two years, curated by Street Level Photoworks for the Tolbooth as part of Stirling Photography Festival 2023. Artists June Barton, Spencer Dent and Joanna Stawnicka each take a performative approach in their practice to explore themes around the uncanny, the personal, gender, and grief.

June Barton’s The Luminous & the Grey presents a psychedelic carousel of colour, pleasure, and pain. Inspired in part by the loss of her son, the work draws upon his experiments with psychedelia and interest in the work of Aldus Huxley to create an audio-visual installation that combines luminous layers of colour and vivid sound to create an immersive, multi-sensory experience for the viewer.

The work of Spencer Dent probes the concept of ‘genderlessness’ through a series of distorted and exaggerated self-portraits which the artist screen printed onto PVC and had stretched across custom steel frames. These commanding works sit at the crossroads of photography and performance, and the artist designed and hand-made each of the elaborate costumes in the images which at once conceal and exaggerate the human to interrogate our ideas of gender and genderlessness.

In Visions Joanna Stawnicka combines the diaristic mode of photography with sculptural and performative elements to create a series of distinct and stylised works that bridge the gap between the conscious and unconscious. This tantalising work reveals the inherent tension and strange encounters that occur within the intersection between the mundane and the extraordinary.

June Barton is a multimedia artist whose practice incorporates printmaking, painting, sculpture, and video who graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone in 2023. Her journey as an artist began after the tragic loss of her son eight years ago, and much of her art practice is about grief and mortality. Colour is vital in her work, and she often depicts sad scenes in bright colours, which she likens to ‘viewing the world through rose-tinted spectacles’.

Spencer Dent is a London-born artist based in Glasgow. Their work currently focuses on the ideas of genderlessness and ambiguous shape and form. These themes are explored through various mediums such as photographic self-portraiture, weaving, painting and printmaking. They graduated from Fine Art Photography at Glasgow School of Art in 2022, and their work was shown at Street Level Photoworks as part of Futureproof 2022.

Joanna Stawnicka is a photographer and visual artist born in Lublin, Poland, and based in Glasgow. Since graduating from Glasgow School of Art in 2022 her work was awarded the Alice Duncan Prize and shown at Futurepoof 2022 at Stills, Edinburgh. Joanna is currently taking part in the imPACT Bursary and Creative Development Programme at Street Level Photoworks.

As part of the Stirling Photography Festival Reflect 2023 programme, each of the exhibiting artists will also be delivering an event at the Tolbooth. For more information on their events and how to book, please visit the Stirling Photography Festival website.