Standing in the baking isle at the local Hannaford, I struggled to recognize the person smiling at me. She obviously knows me by the personal questions she is asking. I have face blindness and have a hard time recognizing people outside of the spaces in which I know them. As always, I ask, “How do I know you?”
The purpose of this work is to visually introduce prosopagnosia, or, face blindness from the perspective of someone affected by it. My artistic representations started in 2015 when I began to sew on photographs in the style of Maurizio Anzeri to show the chaos that audio and visual stimulation has on my visual senses. I spent two more years mulling over ways to express it more intensely. The framed pieces are the recent experiments from those years of contemplation. I chose to use the same few pictures so that I could gauge the effect of each treatment.
A large influence in this body of work is Chuck Close with his larger-than-life faces and our shared face blindness. My interest grew when I learned about the multiple portraits he created of Philip Glass using different techniques. Repetition and multiple media have always excited me and that is why I chose to do this body of work in this manner. With a neutral pallet I felt the collage could be more powerful. The larger scale creates an “in your face” experience without a face being rendered. My hope is that people will experience the uncomfortable feeling of face blindness by viewing this work, and realize that the way they see things is not always the only way things can be seen.
