Jack wants to devour his mother and be devoured by her
later, he oscillates between wanting to devour her but
not wanting to be devoured by her, and not wanting to
devour her but wanting her to devour him.
Later still, he does not want to devour her and does
not want her to devour him.
Jack feels Jill is devouring him.
He is devoured
      by his devouring fear of
      being devoured by
      her devouring desire
for him to devour her.

—R. D. Laing, Knots

If Keith-Roach’s sculptures are the inhabitants of Knots, Page’s meticulously rendered oil paintings are the stand-ins for the architectural apertures of this quasi-interior. His sfumato ‘windows’ paradoxically suggest and obscure an exterior beyond the walls, while his blank ‘mirrors’ both offer and deny us our own reflection. Rich with art historical references and psychological depth, Page’s trompe l’oeil paintings speak to our collective dissociation from physical reality. Light appears to fall on their chamfered frames, but this is all a part of the illusion into which the eye falls, struggling to determine virtual from actual depth. Although his mirrors aren’t actually reflective, Page’s scrupulous attention to detail and sleight of hand impels us to reflect on the image of ourselves that we might expect to see there. Mirroring Keith-Roach’s sculptures, the figure is both implied and negated.

In Knots, Keith-Roach and Page manifest a breakdown between interior and exterior that is at once corporeal, psychological, and architectural. The French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan’s famous paper, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function,” proposes that one’s psychological interiority paradoxically emerges from the outside, from the image of one’s body in the mirror. Like Narcissus, we are enthralled by our reflection – the image of wholeness allays the anxiety of being but a jumble of inchoate body-parts. That wholeness is, however, a fantasy. Our reflection produces an illusion of isolated selfhood that belies our estrangement from ourselves and our entanglement with others. Together, Page’s reflectionless ‘mirrors’ and Keith-Roach’s fragmented figures unravel this myth of individual coherence and explore the knots which bind us to each other.