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Co-Designer of Theory Box

Theory Box developed from Evans and Schmidt’s interest in mimetic theories and practice, including the work of Loie Fuller, TW Adorno, Jacques Rancière, and Coco Chanel. The installation, located in a darkened room with the audience free to move and observe from multiple viewpoints, comprised an intensely-lit cluster of tiny mirrors reflecting a miniature wire-frame figure, next to a second figure on another plinth. Visual trickery multiplied the figures and highlighted the abysmal and vertiginous potential of the mirror. Yet the installation was made of simple components: light, darkness, mirrors, and wire figures; its setup based on the dancer Loie Fuller’s Mirror Dance (1895), combined with the lighting effects of the nineteenth-century magic trick Pepper’s Ghost. The installation engaged a series of questions about mimesis: How do I know this is a model and not the thing itself? What is being modelled, and why? Does it theorize the model, or model theory?

Evans, a fashion historian, and Schmidt, a lighting designer and researcher, brought together diverse fields of study and disciplinary practice – lighting design and 3D space, the history of illusion and popular theatre, images of women – moulding theory into practice. Evans and Schmidt conceived ‘theory’ as spectacular, from the Greek ‘theoria’, contemplation or speculation, and ‘theorein’, to speculate or look at; hence ‘theoros’, spectator. Theory Box triangulated three terms, theory/speculation/model, and provided audiences with an unusual and innovative perspective: a material and physical exploration of historical ideas in a contemporary context that are more usually explored in text-based formats. Theory Box was shown at RBC Symposium 2010, and then invited to Intersection Festival in Prague in 2011. The installation was accompanied by both a recording and a printed catalogue which detail the many references and sources that underpinned the research process.