Coffee and Sandwich at Her Pick (with Alessandor Earnest), 13 x 9 x 2.5″ and 35 seconds, pigment ink and acid free tape on acid free paper with push button activated sound electronics, 2019

In an ongoing series of multimedia portraits, I continue to chase the idea of the artist sharing vulnerability with the sitter. In the previous Sitter Response series, some of the most authentic and spontaneous responses from the sitter were spoken but self censored or lost in the process of the sitter writing on the artwork. These later motion-triggered portraits audibly whisper rebuttals to my perception or emit unexpected sounds from the sitter. The series embraces portraiture as description of relationships both within the tradition of painting and outside of it.

Made without an erasable medium, the physically ripped and bandaged portraits are records of a struggle to improve (my own) limited visual literacy–to edit social conditioning by a patriarchal, white supremacist culture responsible for shaming women who age and engendering racially skewed police brutality. Limited visual literacy naturally grows from a culture that priviledges popular representations of only a few, and through systemic inequality and de facto segregation, fosters a society stifled by parallel separation.

The name of the series comes from the name of the part of the brain responsible for the condition of “facial blindness,” also known as prosopagnosia.