Spaces Between (One Risky)

John Baldessari works in painting, sculpture, film, photography, and installation. Not a photographer himself, Baldessari uses found images—such as these two film stills from Hollywood movies—to demonstrate his fascination with mass media and its influence on everyday life. Here Baldessari combined two movie scenes, removing portions of the actors’ faces or, in one case, an entire head. By stripping the facial expressions from these moments, the artist undercut their narrative possibilities: the viewer is left to fill in the full story and to question the means by which stories are told in cinema generally.