What Is Behind a Smile? examines the smile as a surface of immediate trust. Familiar, reassuring, and socially loaded, the smile functions as a tool through which belief and moral judgment are assigned before reflection has time to intervene.

Across silkscreen, performance, and photography, I pair and mimic my own smile with those of publicly recognizable women. My smile is always positioned first, establishing proximity and implication rather than critique from a distance. This gesture foregrounds participation: I am not outside the system being examined, but shaped, circulated, and commodified by the same mechanisms of visibility and recognition.

Cropped, anonymized, and rendered in grainy halftone, the smiles flatten into images that absorb projection and collective judgment. As they circulate, individuality collapses and meaning accumulates, revealing how easily power, charm, and morality are read at a glance. The work does not offer resolution, but produces delayed recognition—an awareness of how quickly trust forms, and how deeply perception is conditioned by surfaces we are trained to believe.