Index of Strangers, 2026
Work in progress
Work in progress
This series began with a simple observation: we spend more time looking at faces on screens than in real life, watching them appear and disappear in an instant. These small, 7 x 7 cm acrylic paintings are not portraits of identifiable individuals, but rather reconstructions of faces that have been remembered, encountered, or imagined. Rather than documenting likeness, I am recreating the way we pay attention, allowing features to shift, proportions to intensify, and memories to alter what was seen.
Building on John Berger’s idea that seeing is never neutral, this ongoing wall installation considers how the circulation of contemporary images reduces individuals to simplified representations. These paintings resist that reduction by treating the face as something unstable and irreducible, suspended between perception and invention. Over time, the act of painting has become ritualistic. Returning repeatedly to these canvases becomes a performative act of slowed, embodied attention, fiercely executed against the rapid speed at which digital images pass us by.
