For several artists in the exhibition, the issue of gender and gender identification is a prime focus. In Timothy Cummings’s "The Flowering"--painted for the exhibition--a young wide-eyed child wears a cap of blooming flowers. Veiling the tender young shoulders is a lace shawl or garment. One cannot tell if the young child, about to blossom, is a girl or a boy, this ambiguity is one the artist addresses in many of his intimate-scale acrylic paintings. Cummings’s visage appears to be transforming, like his earlier heads, this time into a garden, rather than into a crown of feathers.

Colette Calascione addresses the issue of female identity in most of her paintings. Inspired by books and images of earlier eras, particularly the Victorian era, Calascione invents a world that is her own. Images of women and children in photographs are transformed in the artist’s hands. Calascione never literally copies a photo or its background. When she sees a face or a figure she likes, her vision forms around it. In her visage painting she seems to be conjuring ghosts of art history in the woman’s dress, hat and expression.

Stephen Kaltenbach pays homage to antiquity in his painted clay sculpture as it sits upside down on its crown of gold and green.

Carlton Nell’s oil painting on birch panel in pastel hues is a profile of his wife, pure, a moment of meditation where a woman’s face is viewed against a pale blue sky, the figure and the landscape merging into one, a moment of peace and quiet.

Gregory Halili captures "visages" all over New York in all the seasons. In his miniature scale watercolor portraits, he paints the human face against a single color background, using clothing to suggest the change of seasons. He has also painted faces of tribal peoples of the Philippines, his country of origin. Unlike the profiles of the city paintings, the Philippine portraits face front, gazing at the viewer, bedecked in native dress and headdress.

Asya Reznikov’s video "Space Between," a close-up view of her face with travel footage behind, addresses the theme of travel and presentation of identity in a foreign culture. Her face alternates between a transparent or opaque view, depending on what transpires in the footage behind her. Posing the question of how one is viewed by others when one travels, her video circles around her own visage.