In Faces 1: Identity Politics, influential conceptualist Charles Gaines expands on his late-’70s project Faces, reprising a proposal that identity has less to do with appearance than it does with ideas—even when those ideas end up eating each other alive. A sequence of portraits of influential thinkers painted on gridded panels of clear acrylic presents the viewer with an accumulation of images that become increasingly unrecognizable as one color-coded visage is superimposed atop another. Gaines orders the figures chronologically, suggesting that each philosophy not only complicates its predecessor but risks rendering it indecipherable, even meaningless.
In the rear gallery are two new works from another series, Manifestos, in which Gaines transforms text into music by assigning each letter a note. Here, James Baldwin’s 1957 essay “Princes and Powers” and a speech given by Martin Luther King Jr. in London in 1964 are given the treatment, ending up as two large drawings and a video that juxtaposes text and score. The unexpected meeting of forms, which recalls Ned Sublette’s jazz arrangements of Lawrence Weiner’s text works, is an intriguing experiment with different systems of communication, again implying that the direct messages of original works are inevitably subject to confusion as time passes and contexts mutate.