The Crooked Mirror, a Christmas story by Anton Chekhov, serves as the title for a group exhibition scheduled at a time when some parts of the world celebrate Christmas. Envoy’s “Crooked Mirror” however, is far from being a Christmas show, nor has it got anything to do with Anton Chekhov’s story. It is merely a reminder that, right from the beginning, the images in our mind do not render an objective picture, but provide us with a mirror into the fragility of our varied worldly perspectives.

While we wander in a hall of virtual mirrors, searching for authenticity and meaning, we only see remnants of truth, a manipulated, distorted and mendacious picture. “Crooked Mirror” is not only an account of implicit distortions, it is also a call to improve our mind, to free it from idols before we start any knowledge acquisition. The goal of the exhibition is to reflect the individual and independent nature of the artist, to be a reflection of the creator, more powerful than the mirror.

The work of the twelve artists in the show can be divided in representational and formal interpretations of the exhibition title. In their painted self-portraits Scott Avett and Laura Baran present multiple selves as if they have been looking in a different mirror each time. Brandon Herman’s multiple selves are presented in a series of eight photographs of himself and seven other young men sporting the same crew-cut, as if stealing the identity of the person living on the other side of the glass. Max Wyse’s painting on Plexiglas is of a human figure both a consumer and donor of energy, while Mikel Marton’s photograph and Catherine Tafur’s painting of twisted twins take us even further into the psychological aspect of the exhibition. In his collages, Donatien Veismann presents a take on the farcical exuberance of the satirical theatre of miniatures, named “The Crooked Mirror,” from 1908’s St. Petersburg.

The abstract paintings by Arnold Kemp, Augusto Arbizo’s Rorschach paintings and the distorted photographs by Charles Hovland, provide a non-representational take on the exhibition title, while Carol Cole’s ANI (Anti-Nothingness Image and its reflection) and James J. Williams III’s installation (looking to document, suspend and praise the evils that ooze out of one’s pours as well as the passion and roundness of existence), represent the three dimensional part of the exhibition.