Death Mask

The photographs were taken between May 2017 and March 2018 in central Austin, Texas at the Hope Outdoor Gallery graffiti park--the grounds of a condo project that failed after the foundation cracked and the nearly completed structure was razed in the mid-1980s, leaving behind a concrete ruin. The unpainted 9x7-inch plaster SkullBot head seen in these pictures was made by the public-artist, The Impossible Winterbourne, who installed it on March 25, 2017, against the front of a 24x18-inch rectangular concrete pad capping a four-foot high anchor pier, located at the second terrace of the site's four levels. That same day, the artist adhered eight other SkullBots and faces around the park (at this writing, five survive) and announced to the world, "Feel free to decorate them"--although, no invitation was needed. Every surface of the gallery has been covered and recovered with innumerable layers of paint. This particular SkullBot has been spray-painted by unknown hundreds of people, everything from a random spot to a complete redo, sometimes within minutes of each other, and never left untouched for more than a few days. Certainly, no one has eyeballed every incarnation of the head's painted transformations, but this sequence of photographs taken at irregular intervals over eleven months present one SkullBot's changing face in chronological order.