Invisible as One and Many: The Mirror Drawings of Anthea Black and Thea Yabut

Here, I consider Mirror Drawing, the collaborative drawing project of Anthea Black and Thea Yabut, in which the two artists sit and trace each other’s drawing as it emerges on a single page, against the backdrop of accelerated capturing of real bodies as images. In today’s economies of separation, facial-recognition technologies, and identity-based exclusions and border controls — in degrees that vary drastically according to (images of) race, sex, gender, religion, orientation, and class — we are all pictured as potentially threatening or out-of-place bodies. Black tells me that she sees all art practice as resistance¹ 1 - Anthea Black, “Re: your exhibition,” email to the author, March 20, 2017.. Forms of non-representational and abstract art offer resistance to the clarity and transparency surrounding the fabrication of the quantifiable, categorical individual.