🏴Brian Teeling’s “c-space” installation in the toilets of The Dean Art Studios Dublin is (to my mind) one of the most visceral and sympathetic off-site artworks I have experienced in recent times. It is site-specific, intimating a cruising space for casual sex, with the formal suggestions of glory holes and voyeuristic car mirrors under a heavy red light, safe and not safe. Text ranges the walls and angles of the claustrophobic toilets, reflectively present and absent, like the mirror in the mirrored self-portraits, depending on your standing or squatting position in the toilet. It’s dirty romantic. It invokes the words of the artist Luis Camnitzer, in his text work “This is a Mirror, You are a Written Sentence” (1966-68). Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage is the moment when the child, joyous at discovering they are a whole body in the frame of a mirror, and not just a mother’s limb or extremity, falls into language, and the trouble begins. What excites me about c-space is the precision. It is an installation conceived and made by a photographer, who is not interested in an abject field of representation, but one that extends the photographic medium itself. The mirrored lettering, the curved contour of the wing mirrors, the red light, make this into a photographic image that you inhabit, exorcising more images as you move through the space and time. Poetic🏴

📸Brian Teeling, c-space, 2022—, The Dean Art Studios Dublin