Candid

Jess Tucker

Candid private photographs from the artist’s phone–an awkward hotel room nude, a mirror selfie after a medical procedure–are transformed into eruptive bodies made of her own face. Eyes seem to roll with pleasure or overwhelm, and mouths open as if to gasp, purge, or menacingly grin at the viewer.

They are disturbingly unhinged and yet gracefully composed like icons. Printed on textured metallic paper and framed in glossy candy-like artist frames, the figures take on a sublime quality. Simultaneously exposed and obscured, these hypermediated beings are vulnerable yet threatening in their ambivalent visibility. First training AI models on images of her own face “face-swapped” with itself, the artist then processes candid photos through a combination of AI tools she coerces to recompose bodies entirely out of her reinterpreted face.

The resulting figures reflect a struggle for and against visibility in a time when we are relentlessly reduced and reconstructed by invisible algorithmic gazes. The project also poetically engages the use of white female faces as standard test images in facial recognition and computer graphics development, which reproduces the subordination and exclusion of femme and non-white bodied persons within technocapitalism. Realism, beauty, and desirability are pushed to a level of absurdity, as the artist harnesses her own embodied data and repurposes online-sourced deepfake pornographic optimizations to summon new monstrosities that subvert their context. The multiplied visages of these bodies upend such paradigms and turn the overwhelmed digital self around to gaze back at its automated overseer.