MAY 7 - JULY 3, 2022

Natalie Westbrook’s FACES greet you head-on. They come for you, leering, grinning, mouths a garish lipsticked rictus of joy, embedded flat against the canvas, their features seeming to emerge from the psychological fabric of the painting itself. Westbrook’s faces evoke the question: What if the faces we imagine we see—the ghosts and ghouls and shadows that cavort through our dreams, the flat, silvered-mirror side of our reflections—became animate, aggressive, wild and alive?

Westbrook’s faces, their features stretched and warped into devilish and angelic shapes, haunt the viewer. One imagines them in a darkened room, churning behind the canvas, waiting to be encountered. The paintings, just like the distant Face on Mars, require the presence of the viewer to become known—to become faces. Their characters are animated by our preexisting notions and familiar imagery as much as they are by Westbrook’s hand—or is it that Westbrook’s brush tugs at our own unruly, joyous desires, willing what is buried to come to the surface? Each interaction is an exchange. The faces of FACES awaken within us, stare us down, turn us inside-out. —Larissa Pham

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