ART

We are a visual species. Just as a dog’s brain is devoted to their nose, a large part of our brains is dedicated to processing what we see. Appearance matters. The cumulative stress of life is exposed by our skin. Evolution has given us the ability to evaluate other people in milliseconds, just by looking at them. We’re very good at guessing someone’s age. We see how healthy and fertile they are. Our instincts may tell us to cross the street to avoid them. In a sense, we compare them to ourselves and to every other person we have ever seen.

First impressions have a big effect on our decision making. They tell us how far we are willing to go for another person. They dictate the terms of any possible relationship. The largest organ of the human body is also the one that reveals the most about us. Our entire history is written on our faces. We might not judge a book by its cover, but unfortunately, we are not books. Our skin has an outsize influence on our future opportunities in life. It has a kind of momentum, a force that carries us further in the direction that we were already going. Life has its ups and downs. It seems kind of unfair that we have to display the cumulative evidence of aging and stress wherever we go. Not only that, but we identify with the person in the mirror and we accept the inevitable decay and integrate it with our inner self and gradually become that person we see.

These images are on canvases of digitized human skin