Defacement

These drawings explore “portraiture” in the context of war, political upheaval, health epidemics, nationalist expansion, popular culture, and the asymmetrical distribution networks of mass media.

The face is a sociological and, increasingly, a technological production. It is a topography, an apparatus that hovers above the head, literally a sur-face (“above appearance”) onto which various power structures are projected. In this way, the face emerges as a contested site of political meaning: the subjectification of the individual and the objectification of the subject. It has been instrumentalized, an apparatus by which to exercise authority, recognition-control, and sovereignty.

The charcoal drawings in this series reorient our relationship to the face, unsettling the automatic processes of identification and recognition that render its ideological operations invisible. These images are not masked or concealed faces; they represent the production of a new face under the domain of a specific semiotic regime. This “new face” is mobilized as an instrument in the service of the military, the CDC, the Super Bowl, Disneyworld. The portraits have been rendered featureless, the points of identification excised, but in essence all representations disseminated through the media are “defaced,” deployed as signifiers for other symbolic orders. Here, there is a potential for deconstructing the facelessness of portraiture and articulating an aesthetic of the unrepresentable, to demonstrate the incommensurability of the face with whatever it is claimed to represent.