Keep In Touch

Keep In Touch: The Measure of One’s Presence is a dynamic, ongoing exploration of mortality, self-portraiture, and the digital manipulation of images by the artist Travis LeRoy Southworth. Using a single professional photograph of himself taken in 2019 — the year he turned 40 and faced significant personal and health challenges — Southworth gradually and repetitively removes his own image.

Each work, digitally altered using the rudimentary Smudge tool in Adobe Photoshop, becomes a unique abstraction of the artist's visage. Southworth revisits this single portrait multiple times every year to create a body of work that will grow and develop as he ages.

Touch as a mark-making tool is at the forefront of Southworth's artistic practice, which at once reenacts and investigates the interrelationships between technological and physical artifacts. His use of the Smudge tool is suggestive of a finger's touch to screen, creating an intimate relationship to manipulating a portrait.

This erasure of self mirrors both the relentless march of time and the evolution of digital manipulation. The iterative, degenerative nature of the series could potentially illustrate the artist's own decline in physical abilities over time. Depending on the piece, works can exist as a physical print, JPEG, MP4, or as an interactive webpage through p5.js.

This ongoing project is fundamentally tied to the artist's own lifespan. Each year Southworth generates the exact number of images as his current age, making T.M.O.O.P. an unfolding narrative of his life and creative journey. The series is set to culminate when Southworth turns 77 — the average lifespan of an American male in 2019 — or upon his prior death. Should he reach 77, the series will close in 2056 with a total of 2,222 unique works.

The project's acronym playfully nods to Marcel Duchamp's 1919 work L.H.O.O.Q., one of the earliest known examples of an artist manipulating a reproduced image. Just as Duchamp's added mustache and text provoke multiple interpretations, so does T.M.O.O.P.

It can be read as "trademark oops," evoking a sense of proprietary errors, or pronounced "T-Mop," suggesting the artist's act of digitally mopping his face from the canvas. There are many hidden interpretations — such as "The Maximum Out of Pocket," linking the project to medical expenses and the cost of life.