Five Minute Mirror by Bernie Miller is a site-specific work that presents a mirror image of what is behind the viewer as they approach on the “Five Minute Walk,” the path that stretches across the University of Toronto Mississauga campus. Miller’s photograph is presented in a backlit billboard, a medium of the advertising industry. In the logic of advertising, we are offered an identity that can only be attained by consuming the marketed product. By contrast, Miller’s photograph simply mirrors our surroundings back to us without offering an image or lifestyle for us to identify with other than what we already have. The work is located in what is known as the “Smokers’ Corner” and Miller thinks that although smoking is a "somewhat dubious activity to be at the centre of a temporary social formation, smoke and mirrors do share some metaphorical territory."
Five Minute Mirror was commissioned by curator Barbara Fischer for the Blackwood Gallery exhibition logocity in the summer of 2000. This campus-wide project brought together art that referenced urban sign structures such as banners, large-scale lettering, inflatable signs, and backlit billboards. Miller’s work was subsequently donated to the Gallery with the intent that the lightbox be used alternately to display Miller’s photograph and new commissions from other artists.
The Blackwood Gallery was pleased to present a recent reprint of Miller’s work during the summer of 2015.