Faculty of Art

Printmaking & Publications

Alexandra Tremblay

Prosopagnosia Series

Screen Print & Intaglio - Photo Etching

“In this collection of prints, I wanted to explore human sensations, or rather, the lack thereof. Prosopagnosia is a cognitive illness that prevents an individual from recognizing faces. This impairment of facial identity can cause the individual with prosopagnosia to hyperfocus on other sensations and establish details about the person they are conversing with, such as their hairstyle, clothing, perfume, and voice. This series of images emulates this illness through the use of photos of my grandparents, erasing their identity by blurring out their eyes, nose, and mouth. Furthermore, each photo is kept in the same era—the 1960s and 1970s—to maintain the resemblance of both my grandparents and help the viewer establish similar details in the way my grandmother does her hair, the clothes she wears, and my grandfather’s glasses and facial hair. Although their facial identity is taken away, you can sense that each print has the same individual present.The decision to use old photographs of my grandparents was also to explore the connection I have with them and how those connections grow and distort as you get older. By using photographs from times in which I was not alive, I think it further raises the question, "Who are my grandparents?".”