project archive > Invisible Face
Invisible Face
Self Portrait as Susan Krajnak, 1942
2004
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16x20
2004
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16x20
Self Portrait as Frank Pavlik, 1941
2004
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16x20
2004
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Self Portrait as Frank Pavlik, 1991
2004
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16x20
2004
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16x20
Self Portrait as Marian Pavlik, 1959
2004
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16x20
2004
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16x20
Self Portrait as Gloria Pavlik, 1961
2004
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16x20
2004
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16x20
Self Portrait as Elizabeth Pavlik, 1996
2004
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16x20
2004
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16x20
Self Portrait as Margaret Kadlec, 1945
2004
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16x20
2004
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Self Portrait as Cynthia Giltner, 1966
2004
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16x20
2004
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16x20
INVISIBLE FACE (2004)
“The Invisible Face” was a project I completed for my graduate thesis work. It is a series of digital composite self portraits made from layering my own present day image with pictures from my adoptive family's archives. I was, in a sense, creating my own family album- an invented genealogy, by weaving myself, my likeness, with those of my adoptive ancestors. This process was consciously modeled after Galton's 19th century psuedo-scientific physiognomic composite portraits and Duchenne's electrode studies of the face, both of which aimed to get at some sort of essential truth or reality– they wanted to make visible the invisible they wanted to see the unseen– in line with the intoxicating promises of early modern media technology. The uncertain images that result from this process in my work, however, don't so much deliver on those promises as comment on their implausibility, on the ways in which optical media and technology contribute to a kind of cultural anxiety related to loss, discontinuity, and obsessive documentation.
“The Invisible Face” was a project I completed for my graduate thesis work. It is a series of digital composite self portraits made from layering my own present day image with pictures from my adoptive family's archives. I was, in a sense, creating my own family album- an invented genealogy, by weaving myself, my likeness, with those of my adoptive ancestors. This process was consciously modeled after Galton's 19th century psuedo-scientific physiognomic composite portraits and Duchenne's electrode studies of the face, both of which aimed to get at some sort of essential truth or reality– they wanted to make visible the invisible they wanted to see the unseen– in line with the intoxicating promises of early modern media technology. The uncertain images that result from this process in my work, however, don't so much deliver on those promises as comment on their implausibility, on the ways in which optical media and technology contribute to a kind of cultural anxiety related to loss, discontinuity, and obsessive documentation.
