You read the face before you read anything else
The face gets to you before the title does. Eyes, mouth, where the head is turned, how close it sits to you. You've taken all of that in before you know what I called the piece or what I was after when I made it.
Nobody taught you to do that. Your brain runs faces through a section of itself that does almost nothing else, and it runs them faster than it runs words. So you don't decide to look at the face first. You already did, before you decided anything.
The face is the entry point. It was the entry point long before anybody started calling any of this contemporary art.
Ambiguity holds you longer than expression
A face doesn't have to smile or cry to keep you standing there. It has to stay unresolved.
I leave that space open on purpose. A closed eye reads as peace one day and refusal the next. A divided face reads as conflict, or it reads as survival, and which one you land on says more about the week you're having than about the work. You finish the meaning I started. That's the design.
Most images tell you exactly how to feel about them. Mine won't do that, and I stand behind it even when it makes a piece hard to describe in one sentence to somebody who only asked a simple question.
An expression that resolves cleanly gets looked at once and forgotten. One that refuses to resolve keeps asking you something every time you walk past it.
The cost of being seen is the actual subject
The series is Unapologetic Faces: The Cost of Being Seen. The subtitle isn't ornament. Being witnessed costs you something.
It means dropping the version of yourself you run at work, at church, in the group chat. Letting the unedited one stand in front of somebody. Sometimes that somebody is you, alone, in front of a piece on your own wall.
Every face in the series is paying that cost. Some are mid collapse. Some are holding on by a thread you'll only see if you stand there long enough. None of them are performing for you. That refusal is the whole premise of the series and it's why the work reads honest.
Archetypes, not people I know
The figures in Unapologetic Faces aren't specific people. That's deliberate.
When a face doesn't belong to one person's biography, you have room to put your own life inside it. That's the meeting point I want. My observation on one side, your life on the other, and the aluminum sitting between the two of you.
Give you a stranger you've never met and you stay a spectator. You'd read that face the way you read somebody's face on the train. Quick, then gone. Take the biography out and the face stops belonging to anybody else. It starts working like a mirror you didn't plan on walking into.
Years of reading people don't switch off
Before this practice I spent a long time studying human behavior, first professionally, then because I couldn't stop.
You learn to read what a face is doing before the person opens their mouth. You learn that composure is usually the loudest thing in the room. That knowledge doesn't leave when you change what you do for a living. It's in every face I put on aluminum whether you clock it or not.
People rarely say the true thing straight. They say it with a held jaw, a flat mouth, eyes that won't quite land on yours. So I'm not inventing expressions here. I'm putting down ones I spent years learning to see.
Contrast tells your eye where to go
Black, white, red and gold decide the order you see things in. That's the job they do.
Red pulls first. It carries urgency and it carries danger, and your eye goes to it whether you want it to or not. Gold reads as value, or as something laid over a surface that hasn't been settled yet. The cracks and the poured forms keep a face from looking finished, and unfinished is what keeps it psychological.
I use color the way a director uses light on a stage. You get told where to look before you've decided to look anywhere. Nothing on that surface is arbitrary, down to where a crack runs and where the gold catches while the black around it stays flat.
Seeing takes longer than looking
Most work in the world is built for a glance. These faces aren't.
Seeing means standing there past the point where you'd normally move on to the next thing. The first read gives way to a second one, then a third one you didn't expect. That's when a face stops being an image and becomes a presence in the room with you.
A face built to hold ambiguity needs more than a few seconds before it gives you anything back. So stand there longer than you meant to.
You bring the part I leave out
Two people can stand in front of the same work and leave with two different reactions. One of them is looking at the composition. The other one just got hit with a relationship they weren't thinking about ten seconds ago, and now they're quiet.
Neither one is wrong. A work that holds both without collapsing into a single answer is doing exactly what I built it to do.
So I don't explain a piece the same way twice. I've watched one face mean three different things to three people standing in the same room at the same time. Locking it to one meaning would take something away from all three of them. I'd rather leave the door open and let you walk through it your own way.
What stays after you walk away
The face is the first thing you read. Whether it stays with you after you leave the room is the part that matters.
A strong work leaves something unfinished on purpose. You walk away from the wall and the expression comes with you out the door.
Something that matches the room is done the second it's hung. A face like this is never done. It keeps working on you when you're nowhere near it, and that's when looking turns into a relationship and a piece earns its place in what you collect.
