Three smartphones are held on articulated black arms in front of a woman's face, one over each eye and one over the mouth. Each screen displays a magnified photograph of the feature it covers: a grey-blue eye with its lashes, a second eye at an angle, a pair of parted lips. Behind and between them the actual face is visible, smaller, softer, out of focus. She wears a high collar of mirrored sequins. The ground is a pale gradient from blue to cream.
The images on the screens are larger than the features they replace, and slightly wrong: the skin tone is cooler, the resolution is different, the eye at the left is turned a few degrees away from where the real eye must be. Nothing lines up. The apparatus that was meant to reproduce the face has produced a face that does not fit the one behind it.
What the picture stages is the oldest problem in the medium, wearing new hardware. Photography has always been an argument about substitution — the image standing in for the thing, and standing in badly, at a different size, in different colours, missing the temperature and the smell. Here three of them are bolted to armatures and pushed in front of the original, which is still there, still breathing, and has been reduced to the support on which its own reproductions are mounted.
Three smartphones are held on articulated black arms in front of a woman's face, one over each eye and one over the mouth. Each screen displays a magnified photograph of the feature it covers: a grey-blue eye with its lashes, a second eye at an angle, a pair of parted lips. Behind and between them the actual face is visible, smaller, softer, out of focus. She wears a high collar of mirrored sequins. The ground is a pale gradient from blue to cream.
The images on the screens are larger than the features they replace, and slightly wrong: the skin tone is cooler, the resolution is different, the eye at the left is turned a few degrees away from where the real eye must be. Nothing lines up. The apparatus that was meant to reproduce the face has produced a face that does not fit the one behind it.
What the picture stages is the oldest problem in the medium, wearing new hardware. Photography has always been an argument about substitution — the image standing in for the thing, and standing in badly, at a different size, in different colours, missing the temperature and the smell. Here three of them are bolted to armatures and pushed in front of the original, which is still there, still breathing, and has been reduced to the support on which its own reproductions are mounted.