Stavanger, Norway
We humans are hardwired to respond to faces. We find them even where they do not exist, in tree bark and rocks, and we cover them in people we wish to dehumanize. Julia Mordvinova Gilje’s Do You See Me, ongoing since 2020, taps into this profound tendency. A sensitive observer, she remembers features and later incorporates them into invented portraits, drawn first in ballpoint pen on paper. She is keenly attentive to the dots and lines that together make up a face, judiciously using hatching, cross-hatching, pointillism, and contour to translate freckles, wrinkles, shadows, and all the standard facial features. That’s all fine and good, but something actually extraordinary happens when she prints her drawings on acetate and displays them in groups, overlapped in different configurations: everyone becomes one. The technical explanation for this occurrence is that Gilje retains the same basic geometry and scale from one face to the next, so that noses line up with noses, irises with irises, ears with ears, etc. The affective explanation is that, in doing so, Gilje has invented a novel way of exploring aspects of ancestry, genealogy, coincidence, the uncanny, and, ultimately, our shared humanity. The conquerors of history knew what they were doing when they knocked the heads off the statues of defeated rulers; Gilje knows what she is doing in putting them back on.
—Lori Waxman, March 16, 3:59 PM