Portland artist Gwenn Seemel's Bridge Project: Private Masks and Public Faces. Portraits surrounding Oregon's Death With Dignity Act.

The two series use traditional artistic themes to explore how little we have changed throughout our civilized existence. Public Faces appropriates the tradition of portraits of rulers for the modern audience. At one time, the king's image commanded the same respect as the monarch in the flesh. In today's democracy, the commander-in-chief himself cannot insist on the same obedience as a king once could, so his portrait has little chance of requiring a curtsey. Still, in a visual world populated with photographs, a painted portrait retains a certain gravity. It seems to say that this person must be unusually important, if a little old-fashioned as well. Meanwhile, Private Masks resuscitates the Dance of Death, a medieval European image primer. In it, skeletal images of death come to every kind of person--powerful and oppressed, young and old, all professions from barber to bishop. In the updated version, the death's head no longer looms as a symbol of mortality. Modern, sterilized, second-hand death bans such a lurid show. Specialized death workers take on the roles that relations once held and possibly the awareness that came with those roles. Death is a more subtle presence today, but, however unacknowledged, the most common denominator of the human experience remains the ultimate equalizer.


	October 2005 at Starling Gallery and City Club of Portland, Oregon:

	Death and taxes, the only certainties in this life. They intersect where the government must be involved in the most private moment of our lives. Private Masks and Public Faces lie at this intersection.
	Private Masks consists of portraits of eleven death workers. These are the people who wash the corpse of your loved one, the people who go to war for you, who bridge the gap between the living and the dying. They think about mortality because you would rather not do so. Public Faces consists of portraits of fourteen local public officials. These are the people who bridge the gap between you and the rest of society. They take on the burden of public responsibility because you would rather not do so.
	The two series use traditional artistic themes to explore how little we have changed throughout our civilized existence. Public Faces appropriates the tradition of portraits of rulers for the modern audience. At one time, the king's image commanded the same respect as the monarch in the flesh. In today's democracy, the commander-in-chief himself cannot insist on the same obedience as a king once could, so his portrait has little chance of requiring a curtsey. Still, in a visual world populated with photographs, a painted portrait retains a certain gravity. It seems to say that this person must be unusually important, if a little old-fashioned as well. Meanwhile, Private Masks resuscitates the Dance of Death, a medieval European image primer. In it, skeletal images of death come to every kind of person--powerful and oppressed, young and old, all professions from barber to bishop. In the updated version, the death's head no longer looms as a symbol of mortality. Modern, sterilized, second-hand death bans such a lurid show. Specialized death workers take on the roles that relations once held and possibly the awareness that came with those roles. Death is a more subtle presence today, but, however unacknowledged, the most common denominator of the human experience remains the ultimate equalizer.
	Every portrait is a portrait of mortality and, subsequently, a portrait of a life consciously lived. That's the idea anyway.


Click on images to enter the separate galleries of these two shows.

	To learn more about the making of Private Masks and Public Faces, please visit my blog.
	"Seemel has long shown a designer's eye for color and crisp, lyrical brushstrokes, and now her skills are meeting more mature themes of contradictory and interwoven elements of control and inevitability."
	- Harvest Henderson with The Oregonian, October 2005 FULL ARTICLE >