Facies:
Oona Grimes, Alex Schady, Kjetil Berge, Mia Taylor, Sarah Woodfine, Marc Hulson, Gordon Hon30 November- 8 December 2019
opening Event: Fri 29 Nov 6-9pm
open: Sat-Sun 1-6pm.............................................................
Facies. As in facies Hippocratica (the appearance of the face shortly before death). It faces the selfie. It is a vomiting emoji or a grinning turd. It is the animated 3D mask of identity that can open a phone or get you arrested. For Kylie Jenner it is a shop window. It is primordial but also a construction site. It has holes through which things go in and out; food, light, mucus, gas. It is fused with the person and the mask, the personae and the prosopon (πρόσωπον). It is not a portrait or a likeness. It is alien.
“I understood the horror of a human face. Anatomy, sexual distinctions, the notion of “legs,” “arms,” “clothes”-all that was abolished, and there remained in front of me a mere something-not even a creature, for that too is a human concept, but merely something moving past. In vain did I try to master my terror by recalling how once in my childhood, on waking up, I raised my still sleepy eyes while pressing the back of my neck to my low pillow and saw, leaning toward me over the bed head, an incomprehensible face, noseless, with a hussar’s black mustache just below its octopus eyes, and with teeth set in its forehead. I sat up with a shriek and immediately the mustache became eyebrows and the entire face was transformed into that of my mother, which I had glimpsed at first in an unwonted upside-down aspect.”
Vladimir Nabokov, The Terror.
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FIVE YEARS
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