Rodney Glick
Defaced
BBQ Cat
2005
Digital Print
112 x 166cm
Unique print
To erase the faces from photographs is to allow imagination free reign, for the real features can now only be guessed at and new stories can be made up. To do so is to signal, the movement of memory into history, and the decline of the concrete and known subject into the anonymous past. Facelessness displaces the personal history that made these things in the first place. It allows one to build ones own relationship with these figures, in which they can become stand-ins for ones own family or for creating ones own fictions of origin and relationship. Identity is not just erased but concealed and now it is possible to speculate about new levels on which they can and must be interpreted.
John Barrett-Lennard
Selected extract from God Favoured, Exhibition Catalogue, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia