4. INTERRUPTING RECOGNITION
INTERRUPTING RECOGNITION
Recognition, Observation, and Perception in the Alternate Sides Project
When a portrait is broken apart, something unexpected happens. Recognition begins to fail. What first appeared to be a face gradually becomes paint, color, light, texture, and relationships. The portrait has not disappeared—it has simply become available to observation once again.
Portraiture has always carried an unusual kind of familiarity. We are remarkably efficient at recognizing faces. Within moments we identify eyes, noses, mouths, and expressions, often without consciously observing the individual qualities that allow those features to exist. Recognition is one of the fastest processes our minds perform.
My interest is not in disrupting recognition for its own sake.
It is in asking what becomes possible once recognition is interrupted.
Working within the Alternate Sides project, I construct portraits across modular reclaimed wood panels before separating them into individual parts. As the familiar structure of a face begins to dissolve, viewers encounter a different experience. A cheek becomes an arrangement of color and reflected light. An eyebrow becomes a rhythm of marks. A nose no longer functions simply as anatomy but as paint occupying space. The portrait has not been erased. It has been slowed.
This distinction has become increasingly important to me. I no longer think of fragmentation as the subject of the work. Fragmentation is a formal strategy that changes the way attention moves through an image. Rather than allowing recognition to conclude the experience, it extends the act of observation.
The work asks a different set of questions.
How much of a person remains when familiar structures are interrupted?
How little information is required before recognition returns?
What qualities of a painting exist independently of the image it depicts?
How do relationships between separate parts influence the experience of the whole?
These questions are less concerned with portraiture than with perception itself.
A Seed Planted
Looking back, I can trace the beginning of these questions to a conversation I had in 2015 while attending a tattoo convention in New York City.
At the time I was producing highly rendered illustrative portraits and searching for a path into contemporary fine art. During a conversation with a gallery representative, I asked what separated my work from the artists they represented. I no longer remember the exact wording of their response, but one idea remained with me long afterward: deconstruction.
At the time I understood the word only superficially. It stayed with me for years without finding a place in my work. It was less an answer than a question I had not yet learned how to ask.
Years later, as Alternate Sides began to develop, that earlier conversation returned with new meaning. I realized I was not interested in dismantling images simply to make them unfamiliar. I was interested in discovering what unfamiliarity could reveal about the experience of seeing.
Recognition and Resistance
One of the most revealing conversations about the project occurred during a critique with the artist collective CHOP SHOP.
I presented a self-portrait in one of its more fragmented configurations. A fellow artist immediately asked whether the image could be reassembled into its original form, almost like completing a puzzle.
Their response fascinated me.
The instinct was not to remain with the unfamiliar arrangement but to restore recognition as quickly as possible.
That reaction revealed something important about the work. The tension was never simply between order and disorder. It existed between recognition and observation.
Another member of the group responded very differently. They remarked:
"You're liberating the potential subjects of any work that you're creating from the bounds of fixity."
That observation stayed with me because it shifted my own understanding of the project. The portraits were no longer fixed images waiting to be restored. They had become open systems capable of generating many different experiences while remaining rooted in the same painted material.
Beyond the Portrait
Although portraiture remains central to Alternate Sides, I no longer think this investigation belongs exclusively to faces.
The same questions emerge whether I am painting family members, Caribbean root vegetables, neighborhood storefronts, or found objects.
Recognition is only one way of entering an image.
Observation offers another.
By interrupting familiar visual structures, I am less interested in asking viewers to solve a puzzle than inviting them to experience the act of looking differently. The work slows recognition just enough for relationships of light, material, color, and form to become visible again.
Breaking the portrait, then, is not an act of destruction.
It is an invitation to begin seeing again.