what i’m looking at: Freddie Yauner takes on the world
Across farms, wooded lanes and London streets, Freddie Jauner walks with his mirrored face capturing the world in motion. His ongoing project What I’m Looking At focuses on a reflective mask that covers the wearer’s face, turning illustration in a moving view of what sits before them. Trees slide across the surface. A path runs 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’s where her pull starts. The mask allows the camera to see what the wearer sees, reflecting color, texture, light and movement outward. Instead of showing a person playing for the lensthe work shifts attention away from the self and towards the surrounding world. The person remains present, walking through the frame, yet their identity is maintained within a perspective with foreground and background, body and part moving together.
Freddie Yauner’s mirror mask turns the face into a reflection of the world. Image courtesy of Freddie Yauner
a mask with a mirror becomes an anti-selfie device
Artist Freddie Yauner describes the project 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 in front back to the camera. In movies, this creates a slight visual delay in the mind. A viewer reads a head, then a landscape, then the act of looking at himself. The surface behaves like a face and a lens at the same time.
The project quickly grew through short films shared online, where the mirror mask has garnered more than 10 million views and over a million likes on Instagram. Yauner is now developing the project beyond his own rides, with a public mask release and planned collaborations with select artists, creators and cultural figures. His website arena a current pre-sale for a second drop at £45 (about $60 USD), with orders running until June 30th before production begins.
Freddie Yauner’s practice looks at progress from the side
The mask naturally resides in Yauner’s broader practice, which often uses familiar objects to draw people into larger questions about perception, growth, and ecological pressure. The London-based artist has made pollen paints, created images with a flatbed scanner and repeatedly returned to William Morris as a way of thinking through creation, nature and social change. His work also includes Life Pointsan animated sensor-controlled 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. Jauner strips away his usual cues and gives this space to fields, roads, trees, interiors and crowds. The mask turns the body into a prop for display, while keeping the work direct and proportional to sensation. It has the roughness of a walk, the immediacy of a phone video, and the strange precision of a device made to disrupt the way images usually circulate.
What I’m Looking At shifts attention away from the self-portrait and onto the place. Image courtesy of Freddie Yauner
seeing becomes a shared act
As masks move into wider circulation, the work becomes less about an artist’s point of view and more about a shared visual language. Jauner’s invitation is limitless: put on the mask, film what you see, and let the world appear where a face would normally be. In this exchange, the work retains 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 of Freddie Yauner
Each film shows the body embedded in fields, roads and passing landscapes. Image courtesy of Freddie Yauner
the work acts as an anti-selfie by replacing identity with a localized point of view. Image courtesy of Freddie Yauner
project information:
name: What I’m looking at
artist: Freddie Younger | @freddieyauner
