Mug Shots and the Convention of Physiognomy
A group exhibition
This exhibition was initially planned for March this year but due to the Covid 19 Lockdown the exhibition date was postponed and we have rescheduled to coincide with the Whangarei Fringe Festival in October.
There is a two pronged approach to the artistic interpretation of portraiture. The identification suspect line up ‘mug shot,’ to the artistic expression of an individual’s personality and representation via the artist’s brush stroke.
The artist explaining the subject differs greatly to the official rendering of a portrait for a passport, driver’s license or police line up.
Hangar Gallery invites artists to explore the huge artistic variation between the two ideas of identifying the human condition via portrait.
“We can render the image of humanity as a photo realist, or we can explore a deeper essence, an emanation of the individual that describes more than the facial features. Does it describe character, does it describe a life experience, or does it describe a spiritual being?”
With a world obsessed with physical appearance our typical response is to suggest the sublime in the interpretation of a human face. The cellular intelligence of digital render and face recognition has stepped us forward from classic portraiture. Technology allows points on a face to be correlated and fed into a data stream, compiling information to identify and label the individual. As a practicing artist how does that impact on your sense of what characterizes us as individuals?
What would you wish to portray with a portrait, subjective photographic fact, or the expressive power of the individual as a whole?
