Monte Clark is pleased to present Faces, a multidisciplinary group exhibition that examines the face as both subject and symbol—an enduring site of artistic inquiry, psychological projection, and cultural construction. Presented in partnership with Livingspace, the exhibition brings together a cross-generational selection of artists whose works investigate identity, presence, and absence through diverse visual strategies.

Working across painting, photography, sculpture, video, collage, and assemblage, the artists in Faces challenge and expand the notion of portraiture. Some offer direct encounters: the frontal face rendered with intensity, intimacy, or distortion. Others shift the gaze—presenting the back of a head, the oblique angle of a profile, or the face obscured, erased, or fragmented. Several works veer toward total abstraction, where faciality becomes suggestion rather than depiction—a gesture toward the idea of a face rather than its likeness.

Faces asserts that beauty is not confined to what comforts or delights the eye but resides in the tension and fracture—the provocative dissonances that arise when identity is reimagined through the prisms of race, gender, power, technology, and memory. The exhibition assembles a spectrum of voices—artists who wield the face as a site of resistance, transformation, and dialogue. From intimate portraits that carry the weight of history quietly yet powerfully, to fragmented, digitalized, or abstracted visages that challenge traditional notions of authenticity and presence, these works demand reflection and reconsideration.

The exhibition considers the face as a site where identity is performed, mediated, and contested. In a time shaped by image saturation, surveillance, and the algorithmic parsing of facial data, these works ask: What remains of the face when it is stripped of narrative? What does it mean to turn away, to withhold? How do abstraction and materiality affect our sense of recognition and relation?

Rather than offering a unified thesis, Faces proposes a series of encounters—at times visceral, conceptual, even confrontational. Together, the works map a range of artistic responses to the human face: from the personal to the political, the intimate to the anonymous.

Participating artists include:
Roy Arden, Karin Bubaš, Douglas Coupland, Rineke Dijkstra, Beau Dick, Mari Eastman, Karel Funk, Tim Gardner, Greg Girard, Anthony Goicolea, Graham Gillmore, Paul Housley, Collin Johanson, Holger Kalberg, Evan Lee, Owen Kydd, Helen Levitt, Rocky LaRock, Danny Lyon, Alex Tedlie-Stursberg, John Waters, Stephen Waddell, Jeff Wall, Weegee.

Set within the refined spatial context of Livingspace, the exhibition situates these inquiries within an environment designed for contemplation and aesthetic exchange.

Faces will be on view at Livingspace, 1706 West 1st Avenue, Vancouver. The exhibition is free and open to the public during Livingspace’s regular hours.