Flat Faces

The Flat Faces are “unsculpted” projections and monster-sized portraits. The series is up to gigapixel scales — meaning these portraits are more than a million pixels large. Printed at full resolution the Flat Faces are at least 180 inches, with some even larger than that. Looking at this macroscopic point of view is best experienced live to get the full effect, as the textures of the skin and encrustations and makeup on some of the faces, become like a detailed map. Each work has its own contained narrative, with the larger series including sea monsters, biographical snapshots, painted perceptual experiences, and, in some cases, geographic landscapes of skin.

Technology is consuming our faces rapidly. The mechanical eye is swallowing billions of images of human faces and mastering what it is that differentiates them for the purpose of identifying citizens, customers, and dissidents. What is being collected, sorted, and understood by governments and corporations is something very different than what I'm after in my Flat Face portraits. Many of the Flat Faces reference early human artworks such as mud golems, cave paintings—we have been here far longer than our current techno-state.

The series began in 2009 when I made the first flat face of my brother.

Self Portrait with Droplets

This work is a hybrid of two long-standing bodies of work, Flat Faces and Droplet Portraits. Subjects in the Droplets series become new things and reach out like a colony of new organisms. Droplets are biological, multiple, and mutable. The Self Portrait with Blobs pairs the biological reality of possessing a body with the singular experience of possessing a consciousness that experiences pain, has memory, and is aware of it's eventual death.

Shot at Hunter Shaw Fine Art, where I showed this piece in a solo show ‘About Face’ in 2021.

Cynthia in Neon

2019

Airbrush painted face in three neon colors simulating lighting effects in paint.

I wanted to take the illusion of three points of lighting and flatten it. A map of something that is necessarily three-dimensional and resists the flattening treatment and expresses it’s original geometry.

The paint was atomized thinly and applied with a paint gun.

Mud Golem (Wet)

2019
Potting clay on the models face.

The stories of people made of mud go back thousands of years. It’s clear that when we die we eventually just become mud. The Golem is an echo of humanity, as it’s hard to imagine death.

Hobbes Ginsberg

2017

Styling and makeup is the subject’s own.

Hobbes is a photographer that takes a lot of very moving and beautifully styled self portraits. Her signature look are these messy red eyes.

Color from Three Vectors (MCY)

2020

Makeup was made with a commercial paint sprayer in magenta, cyan, and yellow. Paint is atomized and mixed on the face producing the gradient. This work was first presented in my solo show at Hunter Shaw Fine Art in Los Angeles.

Richie

2016

Model’s styling is his own. Richie’s tattoos and body modifications are all real. Richie is a very well-loved barber and performer.

Breakfast with Peggy

2016

Lucky Charms, Fruit Loops, and Cheerios glued to the face.

Sky

2017

Model’s styling is her own.

Dan

2020

Trash encrustations (Kuerig pod, gum, flash drive, minion sticker, etc) on the model’s face, taken from the ground in Los Angeles. Dan is a musician from L.A., and this piece explores the human and non-human landscape of the city. Part of the group show “From Dallas to Baum Bridge” by the L.A. River, in September 2020, curated by Anna Frost.

Dickface

Permanent marker drawings of penises on the model in the tradition of decorating a drunk friend’s face. The drawings are copied from graffiti from ancient Egypt, Rome, and modern day downtown Los Angeles, as well as from early human paintings on rock in France and Australia.

Cetus

2016-2017

Silver halide c-prints and a dye sublimation quilt.

Collected shells and sea glass on Kate Durbin’s face. Cetus is named after a sea monster in Greek mythology, as well as a constellation. I like to think of the encrustations on the model’s faces as constellations.

This work was shown in a solo show at the CMCA Museum in Maine in 2016-2017.