Mannequin Lisa is a digital collage that replaces the face of da Vinci’s Mona Lisa with the smooth, featureless head of a high-gloss shop mannequin. By fusing a canonical art-historical image with a retail display prop, the work questions what we really know of Lisa ─ and by extension, of identity itself.

For centuries, we’ve gazed at the Mona Lisa and asked: Who is she? Her half-smile, her gaze, her setting ─ all have invited endless interpretation. In this work, I remove those cues. Her face, her expression, her story: gone. What’s left is a neutral surface designed for display ─ a stand-in for any identity, and no identity at all.

The mannequin is a commercial tool, a model without agency, form without self. By inserting it into this most iconic of portraits, I draw attention to the way identity is constructed, projected, and consumed. Mannequin Lisa resists the urge to read emotion or narrative into the figure. She is not smiling. She is not posing. She is simply there, inert, polished, unknowable.

We have applied our own meanings to Lisa for 500 years. This work asks what remains when that meaning is removed ─ when we confront the possibility that Lisa is already a mannequin, dressed in our assumptions.