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To me, those strangers, given faces again through the work of Heather Dewey-Hagborg, looked, hanging silently on the wall, less like portraits than death masks — God bless their very-much-living anonymous owners. In the next hall, entirely innocent of all this genetic necromancy, there was a traffic light. From where I stood, its beam crossed the doorway and reached the waiting faces. For a moment, the two exhibitions conspired: the machine sent its signal, the masks became faces again, and somebody was permitted to return. The light chooses; the rest of us wait…

Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s Stranger Visions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, during Designs for Different Futures.

The full section is here: Streetward