NYAB Event - Max Snow "100 Headless Women"

Max Snow "100 Headless Women"

Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts

This event has ended.

Max Snow’s "100 Headless Women" transforms the gallery walls into a mausoleum, the space reminiscent of an Egyptian tomb with artifacts more mythological than memento mori. The walls are covered with rows of nude female torsos with obscured faces: a salon of ghostly mug shots. Accompanying these black and white photographs are religious statues of saints which Snow soaked in muriatic acid to dissolve their particular features then chipped away and carved them to achieve a more featureless, ghostlike form. In this context, the faceless portraits become a shrine to the unknown masses of a civilization lost, or a fable never told.

The women’s faces in this series are obscured primarily with etching ink. They are not defaced with animosity; rather Snow has wrapped them in a cloak of anonymity to seal their singular identities. The viewer is asked to focus on the collective group and devise a story within.

“When you look at a portrait, you look at the eyes and the face,” says Snow. “The face and eyes tell the story and this series robs the viewer of that intimacy, making it more mysterious and surreal.”

Faces without eyes, in their multitude, become even more haunting. Obscuring the faces of his subjects thus becomes an act similar to scratching the inscription from a tombstone. The person marked by the tombstone is no longer a dead person but rather a symbol of Death. And Death, a territory unknown to the living, can be whatever we make of it.