top of page
"At precisely 3:02 a.m. this morning, and for the next three hours during the “Blood Moon” total lunar eclipse, artist Lia Chavez stood waist deep in the cold seawater at New York’s Brookhaven Hamlet. Spinning fire in a circle, she performed Mirrormind in collaboration with the Something Machine gallery." - Artnet News
"Elicits enlightenment for mind, body, and soul alike." - Whitewall

Mirrormind (2022)

Endurance Performance, 3:39

A commission by The Something Machine

Presented by The Something Machine on the shore of the Great South Bay, Brookhaven Hamlet, NY, 2022

A Rite of Celestial Convergence

Mirrormind unfolds at the liminal threshold between night and dawn during lunar eclipse, where Lia Chavez enters Great South Bay holding sustained flame in dynamic relation to tide, reflection, and atmospheric flux. Over the duration of the eclipse, fire, water, and lunar light generate a continuously reconstituting perceptual field—an emergent phenomenon produced through movement, reflection, and retinal persistence.


The work investigates how perception organizes itself under conditions of elemental instability and sustained attention. Flame, wave, and lunar illumination enter into unstable relation, producing shimmer, afterimage, and chromatic interference that reveal visual experience as constituted through temporal exposure and environmental mediation.

Extending a lineage in which light functions as structuring principle rather than subject—from medieval luminous theology through Renaissance chromatic investigation—the performance positions the shoreline as calibrated perceptual apparatus. Moonlight, tide, and atmosphere operate as co-present agents contributing to distributed luminosity in which no single source governs perception.


Transformation occurs not as passage beyond the created world but as intensified apprehension of its intelligible order—where light discloses the relational structure through which form becomes perceptible and attention is drawn toward source that remains beyond representation even as it is intimated within it.

"Mirrormind invokes the sanctuary of the seashore, connecting its notable power for healing and contemplation to the starry skies above us and grounded mother nature below us." - Whitewall
"Explores luminosity—physical, spiritual, celestial." - Artnet News
LIA_CHAVEZ_MIRRORMIND_03.jpg

MIRRORMIND

LIA_CHAVEZ_MIRRORMIND_05.jpg

Details
Mirrormind, 2022
Performance, Participatory Anointing Ritual and Haute Botanical Meditation Oil
A commission by The Something Machine
Presented at The Great South Bay in Bellport, New York
Costuming by Tableaux Vivants


Credits
Artistic Director and Performer: Lia Chavez
Curator: Jeffrey Uslip
Production: Esther Flury
Presenter: The Something Machine
Stylist: Elanur Erdogan
Documentation: Lia Chavez


Selected Press
Artnet News
Whitewall Magazine

bottom of page