With this work I am employing two concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalytical theory—The Mirror Stage and The Eye—along with Sigmund Freuds ideas about hysteria. Those having then been intertwined with Feminist discourse towards the concept of Metaphysical Oppositions.  

My painting depicts someone seeing themselves in a mirror, which—in psychoanalytical terms—is the moment in which the young child’s identification with its own image marks the primordial recognition of the self. Psychoanalysis itself is occupied with the act of looking, since it is the rational, conscious mode of looking at the world. Whenever we look, we are also passive objects that are looked at; this is something I have embodied in my work through the figure’s direct gaze towards the viewer, and consequently, the viewers direct gaze towards the figure. Now, what they are seeing when they look in the mirror startles them, because they see a hysterical circular arc in place of their pupil. Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud saw hysteria as an uncontrollable sign of the unconscious trying to escape the conscious. I used the fact that this phenomenon has historically been associated with women as a gateway into incorporating Feminist methodology into the painting.  

I specifically appropriated Louise Bourgeois’ sculpture, Arch of Hysteria (1993), in the figures eye in order for my piece to also embody the connections she created between Psychoanalysis and Feminist theory. The removal of the head functions akin to the removal of reason, which connects to the mind/body metaphysical opposition (separating the mind from the body). However, third-wave feminism critiqued the metaphysical reduction of women to their sexuality and body. I also wanted to employ Bourgeois’ technique of making the figure genderless so it can potentially be read as male and therefore function as a feminist act by putting the discourse of hysteria on a male body.