what I’m looking at: freddie yauner faces the world
Across farms, wooded paths, and London streets, Freddie Yauner walks with a mirrored face catching the world in motion. His ongoing project What I’m Looking At centers on a reflective mask that covers the wearer’s face, turning portraiture into a moving view of whatever sits in front of them. Trees slide across the surface. A path cuts through the center of the head. Sky, brick, grass, water, and passing bodies replace the features we expect to read first.
The gesture is simple, and that is where its pull begins. The mask allows the camera to see what the wearer sees, reflecting color, texture, light, and movement back outward. Instead of showing a face performing for the lens, the work shifts attention away from the self and toward the surrounding world. The person remains present, walking through the frame, yet their identity is held inside a viewpoint with foreground and background, body and place moving together.
Freddie Yauner’s mirrored mask turns the face into a reflection of the world. image courtesy Freddie Yauner
a mirrored mask becomes an anti-selfie device
Artist Freddie Yauner describes the work as anti-selfie, a phrase that fits the project’s strange social charge. The mirrored mask has eye openings, so the wearer can move through a space, while its reflective surface sends the scene ahead back to the camera. In the films, this creates a small visual delay in the mind. A viewer reads a head, then a landscape, then the act of looking itself. The surface behaves like a face and a lens at once.
The project has grown quickly through short films shared online, where the mirror mask has gathered more than 10 million views and over a million likes on Instagram. Yauner is now developing the work beyond his own walks, with a public mask release and collaborations planned with selected artists, creators, and cultural figures. His website lists a current presale for a second drop at £45 (around $60 USD), with orders running until June 30th before production begins.
freddie yauner’s practice looks at progress from the side
The mask sits naturally within Yauner’s wider practice, which often uses familiar objects to draw people into larger questions about perception, growth, and ecological strain. The London-based artist has made paint from pollen, created images with a flat-bed scanner, and repeatedly returned to William Morris as a way to think through making, nature, and social change. His work also includes Signs of Life, a sensor-controlled animated exit sign acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
With What I’m Looking At, the familiar object is the face itself. Yauner removes its usual cues and gives that space to fields, roads, trees, interiors, and crowds. The mask turns the body into a support for looking, while keeping the work direct and analogue in feeling. It has the roughness of a walk, the immediacy of a phone video, and the odd precision of a device made to interrupt the way images usually circulate.
What I’m Looking At shifts attention away from self portrait and toward place. image courtesy Freddie Yauner
seeing becomes a shared act
As the masks move into wider circulation, the project becomes less about one artist’s point of view and more about a shared visual language. Yauner’s invitation is open-ended: wear the mask, film what you see, and let the world appear where a face would usually be. In that exchange, the work keeps its humor while gaining a broader cultural edge. It asks what happens when visibility shifts from self-presentation to attention.
the mask reflects color, texture, light, and movement from the wearer’s point of view. image courtesy Freddie Yauner
each film shows the body embedded within fields, streets and passing landscapes. image courtesy Freddie Yauner
the project works like an anti-selfie by replacing identity with a situated viewpoint. image courtesy Freddie Yauner
project info:
name: What I’m Looking At
artist: Freddie Yauner | @freddieyauner