I didn't start with a plan to build a series. The faces came out of years of paying attention to people.
For a long time, I worked with people carrying addiction, breakups, loss, family problems, and the kind of private things that eventually show up in how somebody carries themselves. As a recovery coach, my job wasn't to decide who somebody should be. I had to listen.
That changed the way I looked at faces.
It was called Cracked Faces first
The original working title was Cracked Faces. At the time, I thought the cracks were what I was making work about.
As the series developed, that name stopped fitting. I was becoming more interested in the person underneath whatever had happened to them than in the damage itself.
That shift eventually led to Unapologetic Faces: The Cost of Being Seen.
Why the cost of being seen
Being seen can be uncomfortable, especially after you've been through something that changed you. People may know the old version of you. They may have an opinion about what happened or what you should have done differently.
I was interested in what it takes to stand there anyway.
That's where the title came from.
The faces are archetypes
The figures aren't portraits of specific people. They're archetypes. There isn't a biography you need to know before looking at them.
At the debut exhibition at Goddard Riverside, people asked me about the stories behind individual faces. What interested me was how often their interpretations were different from mine.
I don't see that as a problem. It means the viewer brought something of their own to the work.
Why faces
I have always paid attention to faces. A person can tell you they're fine while their expression gives you a completely different impression. Sometimes it's the eyes. Sometimes the jaw or the mouth. Sometimes you can't identify exactly what you're seeing, but you know there's more there.
That uncertainty is useful to me as an artist. I don't want every face resolved into one emotion.
One work, one time
Each work in the series is one of one. There is no numbered edition or second copy produced after acquisition.
Works such as The Cost of Being Seen and Unapologetic Embrace come from the same series, but each has its own expression and its own place within it.
That's why I created Unapologetic Faces. I wanted to make work about what we show, what we hold back, and what another person may see anyway.
