The Face as Mapped Terrain
The face is one of the first complex forms we learn to recognize and one of the most consequential images we encounter throughout our lives. Before language, before an understanding of social structures, and even before a stable awareness of self, we encounter the human face. We learn to search it, read it, respond to it, and eventually understand ourselves through it. Yet the face is never simply a face. It exists simultaneously as biological structure, perceptual field, social sign, cultural construction, bearer of identity, archive of experience, and site of projection. It is both intensely individual and immediately recognizable as a universal human form. My Face Pattern work emerges from this complexity.
The series marks a decisive return of the human figure into my work, but it is not a return to portraiture as representation. By the time the face reappeared in my practice, the human body had already passed through objects, networks, roots, neuromorphic structures, ritual, emergence, play, and thresholds. The body had become distributed through systems. When the face returned, it returned transformed. I no longer ask only what the face looks like. I ask how it functions.
The Face as Living System
The human face appears to present us with an exterior surface, but that surface is produced by structures and processes extending far beneath it. Bone, muscle, nerves, blood vessels, connective tissue, cellular activity, genetics, age, movement, environment, and experience participate continuously in the production of what we perceive as a face.
My background in biology profoundly informs how I understand this surface. Biological systems do not exist as isolated objects. A cell is defined partly through exchanges across its membrane. An organism exists through relationships among cells, organs, microorganisms, environments, and other organisms. At every scale, apparently autonomous entities participate in systems extending beyond themselves. The individual human being is no exception. The boundary of the face, therefore, cannot simply be understood as the boundary of the self.
In Face Pattern, pattern moves across and through the face, destabilizing the conventional distinction between figure and environment, interior and exterior, individual and system. The structures may suggest cells, neurological pathways, vascular systems, roots, mycelial networks, maps, circuitry, or forms that resist any singular identification. They are not scientific illustrations. They belong instead to a visual language derived from my sustained interest in the ways structures repeat, branch, organize, communicate, and transform across scales. Pattern becomes a way of making relationship visible.
Pattern as Intelligence, Not Ornament
Pattern in these works is not decoration applied to portraiture. It is structural. Where appropriate, I allow pattern to respond to the architecture of the particular face, to bone, musculature, planes, contours, and the tensions that produce expression. Pattern does not simply sit upon the skin. It participates in the construction of the face as a perceptual field. This collapses the traditional distinction between surface and depth. The surface is no longer simply a mask concealing what lies beneath it. Surface becomes a place where multiple systems become visible simultaneously. Pattern may function as information, interference, camouflage, connection, fragmentation, growth, memory, or transformation. It can obscure identity while simultaneously revealing another form of identity.
My engagement with pattern has therefore never been purely aesthetic. Pattern is one way systems repeat across scale. Pattern is one way complexity achieves temporary organization without becoming fixed. Pattern allows structures that might otherwise remain invisible to become perceptible through rhythm, repetition, difference, and relationship. The face becomes a field where multiple systems speak at once.
The Face as Archive
Every human face carries history before anyone tells us its history. Age, stress, labor, care, grief, joy, trauma, endurance, migration, illness, pleasure, memory, and time leave traces upon the body. The face accumulates experience even when that experience cannot be consciously read by another person. I do not attempt to erase this inscription. I collaborate with it.
Pattern becomes another layer of inscription, not replacing what is already present but entering into relationship with it. The face becomes an archive of layered time. For this reason, these faces do not aspire to perfection. They need not be corrected into idealized human surfaces. They may age, strain, soften, carry weight, reveal asymmetry, and retain the evidence of having lived. Identity is not located beneath these accumulations. Identity emerges through them.
The Socially Constructed Face
The face is biological, but our reading of the face is social. My thinking here intersects with sociologist Erving Goffman’s examination of the presentation of self and the structures through which identity is negotiated in social life. We do not encounter another person’s face without bringing systems of interpretation to it. Culture, gender, age, history, language, memory, social expectations, power, and prior experience participate in what we believe we see. We read faces through what we have learned to see. The face is therefore both biological reality and social construction. This is crucial to Face Pattern because the patterned face resists the assumption that another human being is immediately legible. Pattern interferes with instantaneous interpretation. It interrupts certainty and slows the act of looking. The viewer must remain with the face.
The Face as Political Surface
The human face is never entirely neutral within society. It is read before it speaks. It may be classified before it acts. Faces are surveilled, categorized, racialized, gendered, aestheticized, idealized, feared, desired, judged, and politicized. Systems of power repeatedly attempt to transform the visible characteristics of human beings into evidence about who those human beings are. Face Pattern refuses the illusion that identity can be transparently read from appearance. The pattern disrupts immediate consumption of expression. It complicates the assumption that seeing produces knowing. Yet the face never disappears completely into abstraction. The individual remains. This tension is essential. I am interested neither in reducing the human being to social categories nor in imagining an autonomous self untouched by history and culture.
The person exists within systems while remaining irreducible to them.
Individual and Archetype
Every human face is particular, yet the structural organization we identify as a face is universal enough that we recognize it almost instantaneously. A minute alteration in the relationship among eyes, mouth, nose, contour, color, or expression can radically change our perception of identity. Human beings possess an extraordinary sensitivity to these relationships. Some Face Pattern works depict specific individuals. Others move toward an archetypal or universal human presence. The work remains suspended between these possibilities. The individual is real. The collective is real. Neither cancels the other.
Although Face Pattern began with the human face, its inquiry is not confined to the human species. I have extended the process to portraits of other sentient animals whose faces are equally encountered by those who know them as expressions of individual presence. In these works, the face remains a site of recognition and relationship, but the question of identity expands beyond the human, asking us to consider individuality, perception, and consciousness across the boundaries of species.
Emergence and the Face
This relationship between part and whole connects Face Pattern to my longstanding interest in complexity and emergence. Complex systems produce properties that cannot be adequately understood by examining their components independently. A face is composed of features, but our perception of a face is not simply the sum of an eye, nose, mouth, cheek, and jaw. Something emerges from their relationships. Identity operates similarly.
A human being is constituted through innumerable biological, psychological, historical, cultural, environmental, and social interactions, yet the person who emerges cannot be reduced to any one of them. Pattern provides a visual means of entering this complexity without resolving it.
Surface as Contact Zone
In these works, surface is not simply boundary. It is contact zone. The viewer’s eye moves across the face, following contours, colors, interruptions, patterns, planes, and features. We navigate the face almost as we navigate a landscape. This movement reenacts perception itself. We do not simply receive a face as complete information. We scan it. We assemble it. We compare. We remember. We project. We return. The patterned surface externalizes some of this process. At one moment the viewer may see a face. At another, a network of marks. A particular feature may temporarily disappear into abstraction and subsequently reemerge as part of a recognizable person. Figure and ground exchange importance. Recognition becomes unstable. The viewer becomes aware not merely of what is being seen, but of the act of seeing.
The Face as Encounter
This perceptual instability connects Face Pattern to an idea that has remained fundamental to my practice since 1998: “The Actual Experience is the Work of Art.” For me, the artwork is not exhausted by the physical object. The work also exists in the encounter among object, artist, viewer, memory, perception, and circumstance. The face activates this encounter with unusual intensity because humans are predisposed to search for faces. We discover them even where they do not exist. Once a face is recognized, it becomes extraordinarily difficult not to enter into some relationship with it. Pattern prevents that encounter from becoming passive. The viewer must continually negotiate between face and field, likeness and abstraction, individual and system, surface and imagined depth.
The face is not presented merely as image. It is presented as encounter.
The Face as Landscape
Ultimately, Face Pattern questions the idea of the autonomous self. The individual is real, but individuality does not require isolation. We emerge through inheritance, cellular processes, family, microorganisms, language, culture, geography, history, memory, environment, encounters, and innumerable relationships whose consequences cannot always be traced. The patterns within these works therefore do not merely surround the face. They pass through it. They become it. The face becomes a mapped terrain, a living surface upon which biological, perceptual, historical, social, political, and experiential systems intersect. It is portrait and landscape. Surface and interior. Biological and social. Individual and collective. Recognizable and unknowable. These apparent contradictions are not problems I seek to resolve. They are the territory of the work.
Face Pattern remains alive within my practice because the questions it contains remain unresolved: What constitutes an individual? Where does the self begin and end? How much of what we believe we recognize in another person belongs to that person, and how much belongs to the structures through which we have learned to perceive them? Can a face reveal identity, or does it reveal the limits of our ability to know another human being?
I do not use the work to answer these questions. I use the face because it allows me to remain inside them.
(there are two additional essays below about what led to face pattern for those who are interested in reading more)
FACE PATTERN: AN EVOLVING LANGUAGE
Face Pattern did not emerge as a fully formed series, nor has it developed through a linear progression. Its history is one of recurrence. An idea appears, recedes, transforms, and returns under different conditions. Each return carries traces of what came before while producing something that could not have existed earlier.
The origins of Face Pattern extend to 1998, when I first began investigating the face through digital constructions. At the time, I was already questioning the stability of representation and the relationship between what is physically present and what is actually experienced. The face entered this inquiry not simply because of its familiarity, but because recognition of a face is so immediate that it provides an unusually powerful place in which to interfere with certainty.
Those early investigations established a question that would remain available to me long after the individual works were completed.
What happens when a face ceases to function primarily as portrait?
An Idea That Reappears
I have never experienced my artistic practice as a succession of closed series. I do not finish one body of thought and replace it with another. Ideas remain active beneath later work. They migrate, combine with other ideas, disappear for years, and sometimes return transformed.
Face Pattern developed in this way.
Its early digital manifestations were followed by work in other media, including painting, drawing, video, and eventually large-scale tapestry. Each medium changed the problem. Digital processes allowed the image to be constructed, repeated, altered, layered, and reorganized. Painting returned the image to the physical actions of the hand and to the materiality of surface. Drawing reduced the investigation to the immediacy of mark and structure.
Tapestry changed something more fundamental: scale. When the face became enormous, the viewer could no longer encounter it in the ordinary proportions of human-to-human recognition. The face became architectural. From a distance, it could organize itself as a recognizable human presence. At close range, that presence fragmented into individual marks, colors, forms, and repeated structures. The viewer had to move physically in order to understand the work differently. The image changed because the viewer changed position. This movement between fragment and whole became increasingly important to the development of Face Pattern.
Reappearance Rather Than Progression
After these early investigations, Face Pattern did not become a continuous production program. I returned to it when the questions it contained became necessary again. This distinction is important to how I understand my work.
I do not think of artistic development as a progression in which one visual language becomes obsolete when another appears. Earlier ideas remain capable of becoming contemporary again because I have changed, the world has changed, and the conditions under which I encounter those ideas have changed. A return is therefore never simply repetition. The work remembers its earlier forms, but I encounter them from another point in my life. This is one reason Face Pattern has continued across decades. The underlying inquiry remained unresolved even when I was working elsewhere.
2020: The Face Under Altered Conditions
In 2020, the conditions surrounding the human face changed dramatically.
Faces disappeared from ordinary public encounter. They were masked, partially concealed, separated by distance, or compressed into illuminated rectangles on computer screens. People who had previously communicated through the entire visible face suddenly relied heavily upon the eyes. Physical proximity acquired risk. Touch disappeared from many ordinary relationships. To see another person’s face, something ordinarily so unremarkable that we barely notice its importance, became charged. Under these conditions, Face Pattern returned with new urgency.
The pandemic did not create the questions within the series. It exposed them. Questions that had existed since the earliest works suddenly acquired an entirely different social reality. How much visual information do we require before another person becomes present to us? What happens when portions of the face are withheld? What is lost when human encounter is mediated? How does the meaning of a face change when proximity itself becomes dangerous? The face had always been an interface between individuals. During the pandemic, the conditions of that interface became visible. The work expanded.
From Interruption to Sustained Inquiry
What began again under the exceptional circumstances of 2020 did not end when those circumstances changed. Instead, the renewed work opened further possibilities.
Faces became increasingly varied. Some retained recognizable individual identities. Others moved farther from conventional portraiture. Patterns changed from work to work rather than becoming a fixed vocabulary. Organic forms coexisted with geometric structures. Branching systems appeared beside cellular, technological, invented, or ambiguous forms. I resisted turning these recurring structures into a signature formula.
For me, the survival of Face Pattern depends upon its ability to remain uncertain. If I already know what the pattern will become before I begin, the work loses the possibility of discovery. The same is true of the face. Each new work establishes another problem between likeness and transformation. Sometimes the face needs to remain strongly present. Sometimes it can nearly disappear. Sometimes pattern follows its structure; sometimes it interrupts it. Sometimes the surrounding field participates so strongly that the distinction between face and environment becomes difficult to maintain. There is no final solution because I am not searching for one.
For me, the survival of Face Pattern depends upon its ability to remain uncertain. If I already know what the pattern will become before I begin, the work loses the possibility of discovery. The same is true of the face. Each new work establishes another problem between likeness and transformation. Sometimes the face needs to remain strongly present. Sometimes it can nearly disappear. Sometimes pattern follows its structure; sometimes it interrupts it. Sometimes the surrounding field participates so strongly that the distinction between face and environment becomes difficult to maintain. There is no final solution because I am not searching for one.
In my most recent Face Pattern works, the grid has become a means of extending the reality in which the portrait exists. The grid itself is not new to my practice; I have used it for decades as a recurring visual and structural language. What is new is the way it now operates in relation to the Face Pattern portrait. Rather than functioning simply as a device of division or organization, the grid allows the reality of the face to expand beyond the physical boundaries of the portrait.
Within the adjacent fields of the grid, different aspects of existence can occupy the same work without belonging to the same physical space, scale, or moment in time. Objects, memory, biological forms, landscape, pattern, symbols, and other perceptual or metaphysical states can coexist with the face as simultaneous dimensions of experience. The grid does not explain the person represented by the face, nor do these surrounding fields function as conventional narrative. Instead, they enlarge the field in which the person exists. If pattern reveals the face as a convergence of systems, the grid allows that convergence to extend beyond the face, into the larger and less visible reality of experience.
Time Changes the Work
There is another form of transformation that has become increasingly important to me: the artist who began this investigation in 1998 is not the artist making these works now. Time enters the series through more than chronology. Decades of making, observing, reading, remembering, aging, and living alter the questions I bring to the face. A concept revisited after twenty years is not the same concept because the person encountering it is no longer the same. This is particularly significant in a body of work concerned with the human face. The face itself records duration. The faces I understand now cannot be the faces I understood in 1998 because my experience of being human has accumulated alongside the work. The series therefore contains multiple kinds of time: the time represented within a particular face, the historical moment in which a work is made, the history of the series itself, and the duration of my own life as its maker. These histories overlap without becoming identical.
A Living Language
I now understand Face Pattern less as a series than as a language that remains available within my practice. A series suggests a group of related objects. A language can continue generating relationships. It can absorb new experience without losing its earlier structure. It can change its vocabulary. It can become more complex. It can remain silent for a period and still be spoken again. This is how Face Pattern has persisted. Its continuity does not depend upon the works looking alike. It depends upon a continuing inquiry that can take different material and visual forms at different moments.
The works made in 1998 could not have anticipated those made during the pandemic. The pandemic works could not determine what I would make afterward. And the works I am making now do not establish what Face Pattern must become next. That openness is essential.
Nearly three decades after its beginnings, Face Pattern remains unfinished, not because it lacks resolution, but because its capacity to change is part of its structure. I return to it not to repeat what I already know, but to discover what the face has become capable of telling me now.
FACE PATTERN WITHIN THE LARGER PRACTICE
Face Pattern does not stand apart from the bodies of work that preceded it. Although its visual language is distinct, it belongs to a continuum of questions that have moved through my practice for decades. Ideas migrate from one body of work into another, changing form while retaining traces of their earlier existence. I have come to understand this continuity not as a sequence, but as interconnection.
My work does not develop through the abandonment of one concern in favor of the next. Earlier structures remain present within later ones. They accumulate, intersect, and transform. What appears in one period as object may return in another as pattern. A root may become a network. A network may become a face. A face may become a landscape. Face Pattern is one of the places where these trajectories converge.
From Americana–Hispana: Memory Enters the Work
In Americana–Hispana, questions of memory, identity, displacement, cultural inheritance, and belonging became materially embedded within my work. Objects did not simply represent experience. They carried it. The body could be present through its absence.
Personal and cultural memory entered through fragments, symbols, found objects, language, photographs, and reconstructed forms. Identity was already being understood not as something singular or fixed, but as something assembled through histories that coexist within one person. In Face Pattern, those histories no longer require the intermediary of the object.
They arrive directly at the surface of the human face.
From Construction / Deconstruction / Reconstruction: Meaning Becomes Unstable
Construction / Deconstruction / Reconstruction introduced another principle that remains fundamental to my practice: structures acquire meaning through their ability to be broken apart and reorganized. Construction was never simply followed by destruction. Deconstruction created the conditions for another form to emerge. Fragmentation therefore became generative.
That logic continues within Face Pattern. The recognizable face may be interrupted, divided, obscured, or reorganized by pattern without disappearing. Recognition survives fragmentation, but it must continually reconstruct itself. The viewer participates in that reconstruction.
What had once occurred materially through objects and structures now occurs perceptually within the act of seeing.
From Making Roots / Being UpRooted: Identity Becomes Relational
In Making Roots / Being UpRooted, the root became both structure and proposition. Roots suggested belonging, but they also complicated it. To make roots is not necessarily to return to an origin. Roots can be produced after displacement. They can grow laterally, divide, reconnect, adapt, and establish relationships in unfamiliar terrain. Belonging therefore became something made rather than simply inherited. The root also provided a visual language for interconnection. No root exists meaningfully as an isolated line. It branches, searches, encounters, exchanges, and becomes part of a larger system. Those structures eventually migrate into Face Pattern. What once moved underground begins to move across skin.
The root becomes line, network, vessel, pathway, and pattern. The distinction between organism and environment becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.
From NeuroMorphic Universe: Intelligence Becomes Distributed
NeuroMorphic Universe expanded these ideas beyond the root and into networks of communication. Forms resembling neurons, cells, branching organisms, synapses, biological pathways, and invented structures created fields in which no single element controlled the whole. Intelligence became distributed. This was important because it challenged the assumption that complexity requires a central authority. In living systems, extraordinary organization can emerge through interactions among relatively simple components. Relationship itself becomes productive. Within Face Pattern, this distributed intelligence enters the human figure. The face is no longer simply the location of an individual consciousness looking outward. It becomes one node within larger biological, social, historical, environmental, and perceptual systems.
What circulated through the NeuroMorphic Universe now crosses the face.
From Retablos: The Threshold Becomes Intimate
The Retablos introduced another kind of structure: the threshold. Doors open and close. Interiors conceal and reveal. Meaning is encountered through an action of approach, discovery, and passage. The retablo makes the viewer conscious that something may exist on the other side of what is immediately visible.
In Face Pattern, there is no literal door. The threshold has become skin. The face occupies the boundary between interior and exterior, private experience and public recognition, what can be seen and what remains inaccessible. We encounter another person at this threshold constantly. We see the face.
We never see the entirety of the person.
From Paintings for Children and Other Adults: The Freedom to See
Paintings for Children and Other Adults brought another essential element into my practice: permission. The work allowed humor, invention, play, absurdity, color, imagination, and wonder to coexist with serious inquiry. It rejected the assumption that intellectual depth requires solemnity or that sophistication must distance itself from direct visual pleasure. This freedom remains important within Face Pattern.
Pattern can be rigorous without becoming restrictive. Color can carry conceptual weight while remaining sensuous. Strange forms can emerge without requiring immediate explanation. Wonder is not the opposite of knowledge. Sometimes it is the condition that makes another kind of knowledge possible.
The Face as Convergence
Seen within this larger history, Face Pattern is not a departure from my previous work. It is a convergence. Memory and cultural identity from Americana–Hispana enter the face. The fragmentation and reorganization of Construction / Deconstruction / Reconstruction enter perception. The searching structures of Making Roots / Being UpRooted enter the skin. The distributed networks of NeuroMorphic Universe enter the architecture of identity. The threshold of the Retablos becomes the boundary between visible surface and inaccessible interior. The permission to imagine freely within Paintings for Children and Other Adults remains active within pattern, color, and invention.
None of these earlier bodies of work disappears when another begins. They remain available. They speak to one another across time.
The Work as a Living System
This continuity has become increasingly important to how I understand my practice as a whole. A retrospective chronology can make an artist’s work appear orderly: one series begins, develops, concludes, and is followed by another. That is not how I experience the making of art. My work behaves more like a living system. Ideas emerge under particular conditions. Some become dominant for a time. Others remain dormant. Forms migrate. Earlier questions return unexpectedly. Separate investigations encounter one another and generate something neither could have produced independently. The meaning of an earlier work can even change because of something made decades later. Cause and consequence do not move in only one direction. This is why interconnection is not merely a subject represented in my work. It is the structure through which the work itself has developed.
And it is inseparable from another principle that has guided my practice since 1998:
“The Actual Experience is the Work of Art.”
The individual object is never entirely autonomous. It exists within the conditions of its making, within my experience of making it, within its relationship to other works, and within the experience of the person who eventually encounters it. Meaning exists through relationship.
The Systems Look Back
For years, the human body in my work could be dispersed. It could inhabit an object, a root, a constructed structure, a network, a ritual, a threshold, or an invented organism. Eventually, these systems returned to the human face. But they did not return unchanged. Nor did the face.
In Face Pattern, the histories that had accumulated throughout my practice become embodied again. Systems that once surrounded the human figure now pass through it. The distinction between person and world becomes increasingly porous. The face becomes simultaneously individual and relational, surface and depth, memory and present experience. It becomes a place where the accumulated languages of the work can encounter one another. The face is no longer simply something I represent.
It has become the terrain upon which the work recognizes itself.
And in that terrain, all of my systems finally learn how to look back.
(I had a solo exhibition of some of these works at Duke University Brown Gallery in September 2021. Link to very short video here of that exhibition.)