What Is Behind A Smile? examines the most ubiquitous gesture in human interaction. A smile—universal yet personal—can be expressed to intentionally manipulate for nefarious gain or conversely to articulate genuine kindness and joy. Through silkscreen, performance, and photography, I pair and mimic my own smile with those of contentious, high-profile women—Ghislaine Maxwell, Ayn Rand, Hillary Clinton, Mother Teresa, Marie Antoinette, Angela Davis, Aileen Wuornos and Coco Chanel. Each diptych presents my own smile first, always positioned on top. This choice calls attention to complicity. I am not judge but participant and performer; a subject shaped and commodified by systems of visibility.

Cropped, anonymized and rendered in grainy halftone, the smiles operate as symbols reflecting both the individual and the collective, echoing a broader cultural pathology where moral judgment is shaped by surface and spectacle. The work forces audiences to confront how quickly we assign moral weight to expressions. What Is Behind A Smile? acts as a psychological mirror, collapsing binaries of good and evil while implicating the viewer in the uneasy space between performance and perception. In doing so, Kopenhaver explores the aesthetics of power, the dissonance between surface charm and what might be concealed beneath.