Face to Face: Portraits

Voyeurism is perhaps the most basic entry point into portraiture, an intimate experience of looking in on a private scene that has been revealingly exposed. Rotund heads bow together, whispering secrets, in SOOJIN CHOI’s ceramic pairs. Although their words are silenced, the figures draw us into their personal dramas with expressive features etched into their broad clay forms. SAXON BAIRD’s blink-or-you’ll-miss-it photograph, Hold It, captures an unbearably private moment even as it touches on the universal. Erotic and theatrical, GERARD HUBER celebrates the male body in his detailed conté drawings. Huber winks to voyeuristic tendencies in art history with Homage to Boucher, subverting the Rococo painter’s provocative female nude with a tender depiction of a naked man from a lover’s perspective. CHRISTOPHER SMITH unabashedly objectifies with Diana Bags a Stag, allowing us to revel in the female figure’s sexual conquest with an admiring view of her partner’s backside, exposed through a contrastingly elegant shallow stone relief.

Confronting a portrait subject’s gaze can elicit surprising reactions. Instead of a staring contest, the experience becomes a shared moment of understanding. Within the hand-made frame of BARBARA JOHANSEN NEWMAN’s unfortunately relatable Male Gaze, the heroine, rendered in full-color, shares a knowing look with the viewer as a suffocating horde of black-and-white men jockey for her attention. A slightly intimidating wariness emanates from youthful works by HEIDI BRUECKNER and ANGEL ALLEN. BRUECKNER’s Tween faces the artist’s daughter, headphones over her ears, striped pajamas clashing with the patterned interior. ALLEN confines the defiantly shirtless young man in her oil painting, Nowhere to Be, against a seamless green background, making his gaze even more insistent.

Many artists in the exhibition employ materials that demonstrate their subject’s mood. The sense of internal self-reflection witnessed by the viewer in these works is reinforced not only through a wistful expression but in the medium that renders it. BETH FEIN utilizes the delicate chine collé technique to create exquisite prints. The hazy afterimage from the printing process conjures wistful, distant memories or fleeting moments. By contrast, LAWRENCE HUGHES’s starkly graphic woodblock prints draw his figures further into their own states of impenetrable contemplation. MELINDA CLYNE’s undulating self-portraits, painted on Plexiglass, literally have the artist folded in on herself.

These figures’ eyes penetrate beyond the frame, beyond the limns of our conscious to other dimensions. Though indirect, JOAN RYAN’s piercing charcoal portrait, titled Truth, is a startlingly uncomplicated statement on the power of the gaze, realized in the simplest terms: dark charcoal and white erasures, the frame closely cropped around the subject’s braided head. An otherworldly atmosphere permeates WIN MA’s glowing Aura, a poised sense of self radiating through the digital print, and KIEREN JEANE’s witchy, Surrealist painting, Can You Feel The Devotion? In her tactile, hand-held mixed-media sculpture, RUTH IRVING expands her spirit in a metaphysical self-portrait as a comet with fluffy-tufted bits. JUSTICE HENDERSON’s self-portrait shows only her beautifully elongated feet. Casting heavy shadows, they are poised to step out beyond the painting. SEMAJ CAMPBELL’s classically-inspired heroine directs her gaze at the viewer, yet the photograph insists on a grander sense of the future by looking back at and reimagining the past.