A Rogues’ Gallery is a lineup of fabricated faces based on my face. They do not resemble me so much as bear witness to me. I am here both in the image created and in the creating of the image.
The individual works making up this installation began as a lockdown project, to learn to draw individual and convincing faces. Life was lonely and I spent a lot of time looking in the mirror. Not wanting to work from photos, the most accessible and compliant unmasked face I could be in close contact with was my own.
The idea of presenting the faces as a group came after making the individual pieces. There is a bit of the rogue, criminal, thief, fabricator, illusionist, mystifier, instigator, YOU name it, in all of us. What does a face tell you? What assumptions do we make about people? Is anything fixed/static?
So many aspects of the individual are never acknowledged either by the self or by others. These aspects are pictures, assembled they make a gallery, A Rogues’ Gallery.
