Rodney Glick
Marco Marcon
Community Self Portrait
Detail- Installation of Artwork
2005-2006
Laminated digital print on vinyl backed onto aluminium
Each side of the clock tower: 4m height x 3m width
photo: Marco Marcon
The two portraits represent a teenager, on one panel, and a senior citizen on the other. The two age groups are representative of sections of the public that are frequent users of public transport and also suggest the notion of a life journey. These images are produced using specialist morphing software allowing the artists to merge digital photographic portraits of a very large number of local residents from these two age groups.
Once the original photographs were collected the process of progressive digital synthesis generated two faces in which the physiognomic traits of all the sitters were blended in a harmonious whole. The resulting portraits are both beautiful as the morphing process regularises facial features and enigmatic, familiar and otherworldly. They are also real to the extent that they represent an objective mix of actual faces, and unreal as they depict a purely virtual entity.
The artists have placed the portraits in steel frames - like a scaled up photo frame. This visual solution reminds viewers of billboards of celebrities but this device is used, instead, to celebrate the local community through two extraordinary portraits of ordinary peoples.