Layered papers

As using the cut images I already had, layered over a subject's face didn't work too well, I wanted to take the person away completely for a bit and just work with the images. I layered these on top of each other and photographed them, trying different combinations.

I find these pieces really interesting, a new face if definitely created but because the features are fragmented and broken it is not a whole face. Although I do find these images strong in their own right, I want to try cutting parts away from them and then using them in front of a subject's face to create a new gendered persona for the subject.

Layered Faces

In these works I have used some of my previous, more fragmented, photographs cut diagonally in front of my subjects' face. I have also experimented with layering a few of these images together.

I find these less successful than had thought they would be. It is a lot more difficult to line up the facial features closely at all. This means that I don't get the same new face created- the image is so broken that it almost doesn't look like a face anymore. I think I should experiment with layering the images more but in different, more effective way.

Fragmented Faces

After looking at John Stezaker's work, and how his work affects part of facial features, rather than always changing the features as a whole, I decided to experiment with this idea in my own work. I used some of my own photos I had taken previously as images to use in front of the face and one photo of the female to male transgender pornstar Buck Angel. I wanted, in that one image, to explore the idea of using a person whose gender identity is already outside of the sociological norm. I think this could be an interesting idea but one I need to consider more thoroughly at a different time.

The other images, that I had created myself, I cut so that they sat either vertically or diagonally across the subject's face, fragmenting their face. I find the photo in which the subject's eyes are distorted and fragmented by the image in front, so that half the eyes showing belong to the subject and half to the image in front, the most interesting in terms of how the viewer would look at it. 

As the eyes are 'broken' and fragmented, and the eyes are what the viewer initially focuses on, it makes the photo actually quite difficult to look at. This is interesting as people who physically deviate from the norm, according to society, are often avoided by the public, who sometimes don't want to look at them. This also links to Garland-Thomson's idea of the 'stare' that disabled people ore often subject to. 
 I want to further fragment the faces of my subjects by using the already very fragmented images in front of them. I want to keep doing this until the image becomes almost like shattered glass.
 The images over the subjects, the 'masks' don't have to be linear, I could marge a few of them crossed over so fragmented sections of the subject's face shows underneath.

Victorian Theatre Masks

I found some reproduction Victorian masks in a flea market in Brighton. They immediately reminded me of one of Joel-Peter Witkin's photographs that I had been considering for my work.

Joel-Peter Witkin, Arms Broken By Windows, 1980

I thought these masks would be very relevant to my work, they are very definitely gendered masks, particularly the ones I bought.  They, like the mask in Witkin's photo, only cover the eyes of the person wearing them. I have taken a few experimental photos of them, using the notion of the person underneath having expressions that match society's impressions of traits of the opposite gender.

But when I took images of these masks in the same setting I had been photographing my other work in I realized that they didn't work as well as I had hoped.

 

The subject, when wearing the masks in my previous works, have their eyes covered. This wasn't an issue in these works as their eyes were covered with other images of eyes but the eyes on the Victorian masks have holes over where the pupils and part of the iris should be. This makes the images I am creating look hollow and empty, as the eyes aren't really there, thus making the images less powerful as artworks. I have, therefore, for the moment, decided not to use these masks in my work, although I may come back to them at a later time.

Olafur Eliasson- Mirrors

Olafur Eliasson is a Danish-Icelandic contemporary installation artist. "Eliasson regularly incorporates elements appropriated from nature in his work. By introducing such phenomena into an unexpected setting, such as a gallery, the artist encourages the viewer to pause and reflect upon their understanding and perception of the physical world around them. Whether he installs a new gallery floor made of volcanic lava or a delicate rainbow into a museum as he has in previous work, Eliasson questions the familiar, the everyday and the divide between nature and culture.
Throughout his career, Eliasson’s installations and interventions have consciously made the viewer central to the work. This is evident in The Weather Project in which a mirror running the length and breadth of the Turbine Hall ceiling allows visitors to see themselves and the immense space around them reflected overhead. At the far end of the Turbine Hall a large yellow arc of light is suspended and reflected in the mirrored ceiling, linking the real space and replicated expanse to create a ‘sun’. Illuminated with mono-frequency lamps the Turbine Hall is transformed into a monochrome landscape. A fine mist permeates the space in different densities and forms patterns throughout the day." (Tate Press Release)
Eliasson's work explores ideas about perception, expirience and representation. One material that he uses often in his work, and is most relevant to my own work, is the mirror. It "...functions as a device to layer spatial dimensions and expand upon the parameters of fixed rooms." (http://www.suite101.com/content/exhibition-by-olafur-eliasson-at-berlins-martin-gropius-bau-a253863)

Eliasson's use of mirror's questions the preconceived spatial perceptions of the viewer by changing what they are able to see. The mirrors, such as in the images of works above, change how big the room looks by reflecting it in a mirror on the ceiling, and thus forces the viewer to consider if what they are seeing is real.
My use of mirrors in my work is not so much about spacial perceptions but about personal ones. I want the use of mirrors in my work to force the viewer to question their preconceived ideas about themselves, by reflecting their own face, and altering it with a layered image, I wish for the viewer to think about their gender identity.

John Stezaker - Collaged Faces

Whitechapel Gallery -  29 January - 18 March 2011    Gallery 1

John Stezaker is a British artist working with "...classic movie stills, vintage postcards and book illustrations, Stezaker makes collages to give old images a new meaning.By adjusting, inverting and slicing separate pictures together to create unique new works of art, Stezaker explores the subversive force of found images. Stezaker’s famous Mask series fuses the profiles of glamorous sitters with caves, hamlets, or waterfalls, making for images of eerie beauty.

His ‘Dark Star’ series turns publicity portraits into cut-out silhouettes, creating an ambiguous presence in the place of the absent celebrity. Stezaker’s way of giving old images a new context reaches its height in the found images of his Third Person Archive: the artist has removed delicate, haunting figures from the margins of obsolete travel illustrations. Presented as images on their own, they now take the centre stage of our attention

This first major exhibition of John Stezaker offers a chance to see work by an artist whose subject is the power in the act of looking itself. With over 90 works from the 1970s to today, the artist reveals the subversive force of images, reflecting on how visual language can create new meaning."  (Whitechapel Gallery Press Release)

Stezaker's facial collages are similar to my 'photographic collages' as they are combining facial identities from at least two people to create a new face and a new identity. The difference to my works is that my images aren't traditional collages, they are 'photographic collages', they haven't been physically altered after the photo has been taken. They other difference is that in my work I change either the eyes, nose or mouth but as a whole; Stezaker changes parts of these features, like one eye, part of the mouth, half the nose etc. This makes the face less recognizable as a whole entity, it is more disjointed and fragmented than the faces in my work.I could perhaps experiment with maybe using parts of a face vertically rather than horizontally and see how this works for creating a new gendered identity.

Bill Viola - Emotional Expressions

Bill Viola is a video artist who considers "...forms of expressing basic human emotional states". He uses actors and actresses to portray these emotions in a raw, uninhibited way. His works generally appear in front of a plain black background, so all the viewer can focus on is the subject.

                                                                 Quintet of the Unseen, 2000

                                                                Observance, 2002
Viola's use of  expression is paramount to his work. He uses emotional facial expressions to, inevitably, evoke reactions from the viewers. His videos tend to be slowed, so that each tiny change in the subject's face or body is noticed by the viewer, as each change, however small, when time is slowed becomes a large change.
Viola's works tend to start off calm and still, particularly in Quintet of the Unseen, 2000. The emotions of the subjects grows until they consume the artwork. The expressions are uninhibited and, although the subjects are actors, and therefore the expressions are being acted, they look real and not forced, so that it seems as thought the viewer is experiencing fresh, pure emotion.
I want the faces in my work, the subject's faces that are hidden behind the mask, to have an emotional expression relevant to the sociologically formed expectation of the role of the opposite gender. For example, If the subject was to be female, then I would want them to have an emotional expression linked to sociologically formed masculinity; a powerful, aggressive, dominant expression.
I wouldn't want the expressions and emotions to be as prominent in my work as they are in Viola's, as they are just part of the work whereas in Viola's videos, they are a very large part of the work. I do think, however, that expression is relevant to my current photographic work.