Shifty

For most people eye contact comes naturally, but for certain people—especially those with Autism, eye contact is difficult and stressful, due to
over-sensitivity and over-activation of the parts of the brain responsible for emotional perception.
In addition to the effects on social skills, avoiding eye contact creates face-blindness in half of the people with Autism. Looking beyond the eyes, or just under them are typical ways people compensate to seem typical.
It takes me multiple conversations to remember a person and I recognize them primarily by their mouth and secondly their hair. During Covid, masks took away my means to recognize people and I had an even harder time when in public. Recently, after masks were removed, I experienced a very interesting new phenomenon. I couldn’t believe what people really looked like because I realized that since I wasn’t looking at their eyes, my brain had been making up a distinct mouth shape for every new acquaintance, and it did not match the real one.
To show how my face blindness affects how I see other people, I created this bust in my own image but created interruptions that make it hard to recognize it is me