It’s All About The Others: Who You Are Has Everything To Do With Who We Are
[41x36cm] x variable, charcoal, size, oil paint, gesso on canvas, 2019
It’s All About The Others… is a series of portrait heads wearing Hazmat masks. The adoption of masking refers to measures of protest, political strategy, or representational control. Masks provide protection but the question is from what?
In my work, masks, headgear, helmets and goggles often feature as augmentations to human faces. The heads in this series are recognisable as gas masks, drawing on historical iconographies in the way Philip Guston did with his hooded Klansmen, to evoke collective memories of threat. The fear of biological or nuclear warfare dates back to the 1950s and is a recurring presence due to the global proliferation of nuclear weapons and increasing hostilities between uncompromising ideologies.
These masks make reference to threats in both the tangible real-world, the air we breathe, and to the more elusive threats that underpin our digital world, the capture and use of our identities by machines. Surveillance and big data are part of daily life, from visual surveillance on city streets to clicks and transactions online, our lives are tracked by machines to determine our values as targets for marketers, political parties or law enforcement agencies. But the machines run on flawed systems such as facial recognition software where algorithmic measurements are infected with the biases of the people and institutions that programme them.
By their multiplication It’s All About The Others: Who You Are Has Everything To Do With Who We Are suggests community and collectivity, it is a provocation to the current politics of fear in which we live within systems of extreme capitalism that use division as a strategy to maintain power. The ‘othering’ of people is a toxic agenda-driven strategy for the powerful few to divide and silence the vulnerable many. Neuroscientist David Eagleman observes that the human brain relies on other brains for its very existence and growth—the concept of ‘me’, he notes, is dependent on the reality of ‘we’. Marginalised communities have growing reason to fear an increasingly right-wing mainstream, but what the more global environmental crisis might suggest is that what we might really fear is ourselves unless the ‘I’ becomes ‘we’.
In this series of paintings, the material of paint plays with surface realities in a sleight-of-hand between ground and form. The drawn head is sealed into the canvas ground, the mask is on the surface but gesso, traditionally applied first as the ground, forms the final layer. Inverting or interrupting the logical sequence of painting to question what is inside or outside of the protective mask and where the danger might actually lie.
NB to effectively filter out the dangerous small particles found in city air requires an industry-standard Hazmat mask,