The Black Panels (Les yeux sans visage)

This work is made up of two groups of appropriated images - Photographs documenting early experiments in plastic surgery after World War I and frame stills from the 1959 horror film "Les yeux sans visage", by the French filmmaker Georges Franju, which told of the efforts of a megalomaniac plastic surgeon to remake his daughter's face (horribly disfigured in a car accident) using the skin of living victims. In spite of their different circumstances, the victims resemble each other because of the masks they wear, symbols of the surgeons' failure to repair the damage, and of society's unwillingness to accept their grotesque countenances. Yet this act of grafting the inanimate onto the animate creates an uncanny appearance that is as horrifying, ultimately, as the original injury.