FACE

A landscape of naked planes and sudden recesses, exposures of bone and furrowing resources of sense and expression, the human face has evolved to convey complicated information. In portraiture, an art form with us since the edge of history, the face portrayed bears additional signifiers: geographies, genders, family emblems, status, power, health, and the mysterious interplay between artist and subject. As a commonality of our species and a window through which essential human exchanges are negotiated, the face is a value we once took for granted, until faces were taken from us. FACE examines conceptual and aesthetic means of reclaiming versions of ourselves through portraiture executed in radically diverse forms.

In the post pandemic era the faces of others become a daily abstraction, mitigated by masks and screens, manipulated pixels and glitches in time and space. The artists of FACE confront anew the intimate, fearsome, occasionally overwhelming experiences of perceiving humanity in the spontaneous moment of catching sight of a human face. Delineated in photographs and paintings, Daguerreotypes, raucous collage transfers, and ghostly etchings on glass, this collection of representations ranges from the faces of politicians to delicate reliquaries portraying the cast aside. Some images echo from barely-remembered dreams and fairy tales, others present fully embodied people, captured in all their enigmatic specificity. Each of the artists of FACE reconsider the portrait in contemporary terms: the inscrutable emotions of our time, and the signifiers we seek to both remember and forget.

Artists include: Diane Arbus, Rachel Bess, Enrique Chagoya, Binh Danh, Claudio Dicochea, Ben Durham, Gilbert Garcin, Rimma Gerlovina and Valeriy Gerlovin, Siri Devi Khandavilli, Luo Brothers, Carrie Marill, Reynier Leyva Novo, Luis Gonzalez Palma, Charlotte Potter, and Benjamin Timpson.