After making these pictures for Assignment 5, Stills From A Lost Horror Film, I had a lot of images of facial expressions left over.
I decided the idea could be pushed much further. After seeing the huge images displayed by Rodney Graham and others I thought I would like to make an image at least 3 feet by 4 and fill it with my facial expressions apart from the bottom right hand corner where my face would be in a jar. I want a wooden frame round the whole picture to react with the frames of the individual images and then the frame within a frame of the face in the jar. I also want the various faces to seem to interact with one another in some way perhaps as they respond to their immediate context making a kind of internal narrative. I want the whole to say something about a character being encapsulated and hidden in plain sight behind the barrier of how people present themselves to the world. I mocked up this image.
or perhaps this.
or even a diptych: one frame of faces, the other the face in the jar.
And then I thought about the sometimes arbitrary nature of moods. Perhaps one could construct a narrative based on the throw of dice like these. The range of expression is trapped by the six sided convention of the die just as the face was trapped in a bottle earlier but here fate can play its part.
The game is to act out the mood that goes with the expression or, if several dice are thrown, to create a story to explain the connection between the various expressions.
Chris Whittle 