Finding The Beauty In Difference: A Review on Unlikeness

"Our human inclination to read another person’s face and presume their age, gender, race, and personality is almost instantaneous. We focus on what we think we understand, and what matches our idea of how other people look and behave. When we encounter a face that’s unlike our own or not easy to categorize, we may respond with confusion, interest, or displeasure." - Elizabeth MacKenzie, blog post. 

 

Elizabeth MacKenzie, Unlikeness.  Teck Gallery, 2020. Photos: Rachel Topham Photography.

        Elizabeth MacKenzie’s exhibition Unlikeness, curated by Makiko Hara and viewable at the SFU Teck Gallery from August 31, 2020, to April 25, 2021, uses scale and watercolor graphite to create three faces with a shifting and ambiguous landscape. The unidentifiable nature of her faces cause feelings of discomfort and ask us to contemplate the importance of looking deeper in order to recognize and accept each other’s differences. 

        Unlikeness is located at the very back of the SFU student and faculty common area of the Harbour Centre and consists of three images. The first image is visible on the curved left-hand wall as you walk up to the space. It’s smaller than the other two images in scale and has been placed where the viewer must stand back or look up in order to see it. Across a ramp into the back of the space are two much larger images located on adjacent walls. One image on the left is inverted whereas the other image on the right is right-side up. The fashion in which these two images are placed directs our eyes to consider a giant window between them overlooking the convention center, train tracks, and ocean. With her design of the space, MacKenzie is requiring us to look up and beyond what we know in order to understand these images. Moreover, to notice what we would not usually acknowledge. This is especially discernible when one realizes that the Harbour Centre common area is usually a place for study where most people are looking down, and keeping to themselves. Each image resembles what could be a familiar face however, they are unable to generate a feeling of ease. The faces are indistinct and their features are warped and muffled. It’s unclear where these faces come from and if they are being held by the wall or floating in space. It seems as though the faces could be looking at you or past you and beyond. The faces are extremely different from one another but each face could be anyone and is everyone. 

Elizabeth MacKenzie, Unlikeness.  Teck Gallery, 2020. Photos: Rachel Topham Photography.

            Gender, race, and age are not entirely obvious and this can result in a myriad of possible interpretations of who or what these faces might be. MacKenzie creates her faces by using a brush to animate a graphite pigment as it floats upon small sheets of stone paper. In an interview with curator Makiko Hara, MacKenzie states that she pushes the materiality of her drawings so that she is able to relinquish control on what the finished product will look like. This allows the face to become anyone and not any person in particular. The watercolor graphite inherently creates an ambiguous field of interaction between light, dark, wet, and dry. This renders the faces with an unfinished feel, still in the process of shifting or morphing like a ghost that’s all at once there and then somewhere else. Size is an important factor within the work. In the interview with Makiko Hara, MacKenzie reveals that the faces began as simply small drawings. She states that the drawings began on paper and were only 3 x 2 inches in size. High-resolution photography enabled MacKenzie to reproduce these drawings as large-scale digital prints on heavy-weight paper.  Due to the size of the two faces, we are able to look closely at the specific complexities within them. We are able to notice that the patterns within each face could resemble a celestial landscape or earthly craters and canyons. It is as if the first, smaller face we see on the left-hand side is an example specimen to be considered and then we are presented with the zoomed-in microscopic view of what these specimens may contain. When you step away from the image however you see the same human face that could easily be someone like you and me. 

            The resemblance of MacKenzie’s images to everyday human faces allows the viewer to notice how they might relate to these images and prompts them to realize their innate learned reactions towards what could be considered unlike themselves.  MacKenzie deliberately displays her images in opposition to the viewer with their size and the way they could be human but then look very obscure and inhuman at the same time. Due to the unintelligible nature of these images, the viewer is left feeling disoriented and this can bring up learned reactions that are consistent with the process of othering. However, with a closer look at the details in each face, the viewer can notice the beauty and mystery inside each one. MacKenzie’s morphed and blurred faces encourage us to consider the other for all its complexities and to refrain from dismissing them outright. Furthermore, her faces evoke Édouard Glissant’s Theory of Opacity which was a response to the Western imperialists' demand to know and understand the other.  In his theory, he makes a call for the right to recognize difference. Glissant emphasizes that we must refer “not to Humanity but to the exultant divergence of humanities.”  

Elizabeth MacKenzie, Unlikeness.  Teck Gallery, 2020. Photos: Rachel Topham Photography.

            Elizabeth MacKenzie’s Unlikeness is a quiet and welcoming surprise of a call to action and a contemplation on otherness. The faces in Unlikeness allow us the time and space to consider that it is our responsibility to see and attempt to understand the other without judgment. Through her images, MacKenzie makes a strong argument against the practice of othering in which learned negative attributes are characterized towards certain groups of people. As a society, we have designated learned responses to what we see as socially acceptable or different. However, we need to allow ourselves the time to look deeper and past what we see initially and into the depths of who people are. Moreover, we must begin to openly welcome these differences. I am reminded that it is important for us to accept one another and allow understanding now more so than ever before. Due to our political climate and the global pandemic, division is at its most prominent and our need to practice openness is an important step towards inclusivity and understanding each other’s internal complexities. To quote Asbjørn Skarsvåg Grønstad in Rethinking Art and Visual Culture: The Poetics of Opacity, “broken art refracts a sense of the inherent precariousness of our lives and helps cultivate an ethical relation to the world and its persistent otherness.” 

Sources

“Elizabeth MacKenzie: Unlikeness.” SFU Galleries, Feburary, 2021, http://www.sfu.ca/galleries/teck-gallery/Unlikeness.html  

Elizabeth MacKenzie.” SFU Teck Gallery, Sept 4, 2020. February 2021. http://www.sfu.ca/galleries/sfu-galleries-blog/blog-2020/HaraElizabeth.html. 

Hara, Makiko, and MacKenzie, Elizabeth. “Interview: Curator Makiko Hara in Dialogue with Artist 

MacKenzie, Elizabeth. “Unlikeness, 2020.” Elizabeth Mackenzie (blog), February 2021. http://www.elizabeth-mackenzie.com/#/new-gallery-2/ 

Glissant Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbour: The University of Michigan Press, 2010. https://trueleappress.files.wordpress.com/2017/10/glissant-poetics-of-relation.pdf 

Grønstad, Asbjørn Skarsvåg, Rethinking Art and Visual Culture: The Poetics of Opacity / by Asbjørn Skarsvåg Grønstad. 1st ed, Springer International Publishing, Norway 2020.