portraiture in a digital age
Portraiture is conventionally considered a mostly contrived, self-serving and self defining form. ‘Face To Face: Portraiture In A Digital Age’ actively interrogates and deconstructs these notions. The portraits do not just sit motionless on the gallery wall, as the title suggests they are face to face in how they actively engage, question and interact with the viewer. The curator Dr Kathy Cleland, has ensured that from every angle we encounter digital ‘others’—avatars, doubles, chimera, morphs, cyborgs and hybrid-selves which have disrupted the very self-embodiment expected of portraiture.
Biohead Actualized by Anna Davis and Jason Gee presented a cheeky ventriloquist doll-head that continually spilled a diatribe from self-help audio books. The obnoxious doll in this work parodies the personae that proliferate on internet blogs, accountable to no one and full of zeal and antagonisms. Time And Motion Study by John Tonkin turns the table on us, so that we, in this case inadvertently, become the subject. A rapid series of portraits of the viewers are lined up in a kaleidoscope of splices, where only what moves becomes visible. The viewer can move back and forth through time to see previous gallery viewers. Angelica Mesiti’s Heroes re-frames David Bowie’s foggy back-lit video as twin images of women stand in a state of wonder, their mystified gaze focused beyond the viewer.
Both Denis Beaubois’s Constant and David Rosetzky’s Without You explore the concept of the morphing of one face into another. In Constant, the morphing is very gradual and fluid, the seamless transformation of identity suggests the dissolution of barriers between age and race. In the latter however, the shell-like boundaries are firmly maintained, giving us a sense of hybrid subjectivites, as