Familiar Faces, Unfamiliar Identity

This piece started as an experiment with some familiar faces in media lately.

Some are recognizable. Some are altered. None of them are real anymore. It emerged from combining features until something new looked back at me.

Something interesting.

I tend to think of a face as something fixed. This is me. This is you. This is that person.

But just slight changes in proportion, blending together familiar lines and removing clutter, can make identity quite unstable. A familiar face can become unfamiliar very quickly, while a completely contrived face can feel like someone you recognize.

This session also made me think about how much of identity exists in the face, and how much comes from what we already know, or think we know, about the person looking back at us.

At what point is a face not the face you see in the mirror anymore?

This is an area I want to keep exploring: somewhere between portraiture, distortion, technology and identity.