Interview excerpt from Who Will Guard the Guards: A Catalog of Masked Portraits, 2009. Catalog is available by request.
GP: Your new works straddle the line between figuration and abstraction while also remaining in close dialogue with contemporary political issues—and all of this without slipping into a reductive evaluation of such loaded imagery. These oppositions seem to be weighed equally throughout the works, which leads me to my first question. While you are working squarely within the idiom of portraiture, you are also obscuring—or negating—the specific identity of the subjects wearing the hoods. Along these lines, how does the idea of literal representation operate within your work?
JW: From the beginning, the choice to deal with media-based images in my work, images that were synonymous with the “War on Terror,” caught me in a predicament. How could I evoke a new way of seeing an image that was already so loaded, obvious and overstated? And yet the impulse to work with an image like the headscarf or terrorist mask was to confront the issue head-on, to complicate a way of seeing something that had been reduced to an ideological slogan.
In the process of making the work, I discovered that the mask could become a symbol for this problem of representation, the overwhelming desire to see something that is deliberately hidden or masked from view. So I attempted to represent, as literally as possible, an individual that I could not see—and within the context of traditional portraiture this sets up a contradiction of sorts. Symbolically, this seemingly impossible act resonated with me; it was a time when rhetorical, and actual attacks against an unknown enemy inundated our media landscape.
On the one hand, my work could be viewed as a form of portraiture, but on the other hand, it could also be seen as a system of classification, one that mimics stylistically the meticulous detail of a naturalist painter and yet mocks conceptually the desire to contain and subjugate one’s topic of representation. I tend to think about this approach to portraiture in relation to the work of 18th and 19th century catalogers, like John James Audubon. His project to visually document bird species of North America produced meticulous paintings, which he considered scientific in nature.
For the full interview, click on "Interview tihe Gregg Perkins" and link to his website.