Weekend Portfolio: Dominic Toerien: Prosopagnosia
Image and Text by Dominic Toerien
Prosopagnosia is a neurological condition characterized by the inability to recognize the faces of familiar people. Prosopagnosia is also known as face blindness or facial agnosia. The term prosopagnosia comes from the Greek words for “face” and “lack of knowledge.
In this series of portraits, I use canvas as well as digital software to wrap and hide the human form and to manipulate and distort its features. The idea of wrapping the body in canvas stems from the idea of the “Tabula Rasa” or “Blank Slate” but instead of a blank slate I used blank canvas. In John Locke’s philosophy, Tabula Rasa is the theory that at birth the (human) mind is a “blank slate” without rules for processing data, and that data is added and rules for processing are formed solely by one’s sensory experiences.
