Cross, Cornford &

Cornford & Cross

British

About the Artist

London-based collaborative artists Matthew Cornford & David Cross (Cornford and Cross) engage in a conceptual practice with many formal permutations. '10' is a technological social-Darwinist exploration of ideal beauty. For this project, funded by the British Arts Council in an economically challenged town in England, Cornford & Cross conducted a 'beauty contest' whereby willing participants would win a prize.  The ten willing participants had their faces photographed and blown up to 6' mural prints stretched onto canvas and displayed around in a community center in Darby, England. The faces were on view for the run of the exhibition and the public could guess who was going to win and who they thought were the most beautiful. Cornford and Cross used police profiling software for each of the ten participant's faces, where scans would measure the distance between their eyes, straightness of their lips, etc. and a score was developed based on symmetry. At the end of the exhibition a winner was announced based on this profiling program, a symmetry score effectively. This work questions the importance of beauty to economic advantage, and to what extent this judgment occurs in our everyday life. Cornford and Cross began collaborating in 1987.  The complete project "10" has been in the West Collection since 1998.

Works

Exhibitions

coming soon…