Rowland
cv
©2026
Jake Rowland’s photographs appear to show people at nearly the same age and, in their close resemblance to each other, perhaps related. Rowland successfully treads a fine line in these plausible yet uncanny likenesses of a hypothetical ‘family,’ made by fusing the identities of more than one sitter.
In his series “The River Rock Variations,” Rowland digitally combines portraits of himself and his wife in a potent contemplation of the fusing of identities within a marriage.
-from the catalogue “PEEK” (Art+Commerce, New York City, 2005)
“...the New York-based artist Jake Rowland explores the mysterious depths of family resemblance; the incompatibility of facial features, which must always fall short of establishing a congruent and “natural” composite face. Here, the genealogising gaze of composite portraiture, much in the sense of its Wittgensteinian adaptation and Freudian reinterpretation, is directed against its materialist evidential claims. Also the notion of the uncanny becomes stressed in the images: The partial compositions of the artist and his family members result in haphazard combinations of facial elements highlighting the literally “defamiliarising” effect of the technique. The deliberately uncanny images actively counteract the beautifying effect of composite aesthetics;134 they challenge gender ascriptions and form composite countenances that could originate from a Freudian analysis of dreams.”
-from Composite Portraits: The Photographic Construction of Composite Faces at the Intersection of Science and the Arts (2023) by Raul Gschrey
All images: from the series “The River Rock Variations”, 30x40 inches, Archival Pigment Prints, 2005.
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