VULTUS: Liminal Faces Faces

Jonni Cheatwood, Tania Marmolejo, Adriana Oliver

Exhibition Poster

“The face is not a sign but a map; it is not merely a part of the body, but a social and political product in which meaning is composed and the subject is formed.”
— Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (adapted quotation)

Installation view, VULTUS: Liminal Faces — Between Invisible Selves and Infinite Boundaries, May 9 – 31, 2025. Artwork © Jonni Cheatwood; Tania Marmolejo; Adriana Oliver. Courtesy of the Artists and ELIGERE. Photos: Heesoo Park

VULTUS: Liminal Faces dismantles the fixedness of identity through the figure of the face, illuminating—through the gazes of three artists—how the face as a social sign is continually constructed and deconstructed. Although the Latin word vultus simply means “face” or “expression,” here it becomes a conceptual point of departure, framing the face as a field where social codes, psychological depth, and aesthetic experience intersect.

Invoking Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of visagéité (“faciality”), the exhibition refuses to treat the face as merely biological or personal. The face is a political structure society places upon the individual, a semiotic apparatus of power imposed on the body. It is the site where meaning condenses, the subject is captured, and identity is defined—yet it can also become a line of flight. Faciality is at once a machine of reterritorialization and a generative field that unsettles its own borders. The title phrase “liminal faces” rests precisely on this current: identity is never fastened to a single face, nor is a face bound to a single identity.

Accordingly, the exhibition reconstructs the face. Rather than fixed emblems of the self, the artists present faces that are perpetually forming and shifting, probing what the face can reveal, conceal, and become. Tania Marmolejo, Adriana Oliver, and Jonni Cheatwood each re-imagines the face in distinct ways, visualizing within its form the instability of contemporary identity, the breadth of emotion, social positionality, and detachment from it. Deconstructing or rebuilding the face, they explore the boundaries of self and the conditions of identity, proposing the face not as a static form but as a trembling, ever-transitional place of existence. Marmolejo’s faces mine emotional depth; Oliver minimizes the face as a social symbol; Cheatwood translates the very act of making a face. Their works no longer declare who someone is, but ask what one might become.

Tania Marmolejo, drawing on a background where Dominican and Nordic cultures intersect, explores the dualities of female identity and the subtle strata of the inner life. Her figures, forever silent yet intent in their gaze, make emotion palpable. Enlarged eyes and structurally simplified forms guide viewers across an emotional terrain whose density expands to monumental scale. Her faces look straight ahead while sinking inward, raising an “imperfect self” that wavers between social expectation and inner desire.

Adriana Oliver pushes anonymity to its extreme. Figures rendered with the barest lines, flat compositions, and omitted expressions dismantle the social signs and power structures embedded in the face—resisting the roles and symbols society assigns to it. Faces stripped of race, class, and affect awaken latent readings and memories in the viewer, evoking collective humanity beyond personal history and visually asking, “What does the face disclose, and what does it hide?”

Jonni Cheatwood dismantles—and indeed constructs—the face. Collisions of torn canvas, fabric, drawing, and paint continually break down the boundary of fixed persona. Rejecting formal consistency and emotional clarity, his faces appear as organic clashes of constituent elements, possibilities still taking shape, revealing identity as a process forever stitched together and taken apart like a patchwork.

Through the familiar device of the face, VULTUS: Liminal Faces ventures into the most unfamiliar, ambiguous boundaries of the self. Fixed identity, clear meaning, and singular emotion are absent; in their place stand ambiguity, multiplicity, and trembling borders. The exhibition asks: With what face do we live, who made that face, and can we flee from it?

Questioning how the self is constructed and how society bestows identity through the face, the exhibition simultaneously proposes the possibility of escaping every construction and prescription. It offers no definitive answers, but guides viewers to redraw their own faces from within. Here, the face is no longer something captured—it is constantly in flux.

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VULTUS: Liminal Faces Faces

[GALLERIES] ELIGERE

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