ABOUT FACE

Some years ago I was invited to be the artist-in-residence at Pittsburgh’s Wesley Spectrum Highland, a school for students with autism, learning disabilities and behavioral health issues. My residency, which led to the exhibition About Face, was a component of an ongoing partnership between myself, The Andy Warhol Museum, the Cognitive Psychology Department at the University of Victoria, BC, and Wesley Spectrum Highland.

The goal of this partnership was to improve autistic youth’s communication skills by developing and piloting activities that utilize Warhol’s portraits and the practice of contemporary portrait artists to teach facial expression recognition skills to students within the autism spectrum.

The exhibition featured twenty-four three-dimensional, large format photographs, mounted on aluminum, which were fixed open at a 55-degree angle, and mounted directly on the gallery walls. From one perspective the viewer sees only a neutral expression black and white portrait of the student, while from the other angle one views an open spread revealing an expressive image of the student responding to an accompanying (facing) emotional motivator, both photographs in color. Motivator/stimulator images were chosen by the students and range from a photograph of kittens at play to a violent fistfight.