Press Gallery (new window) Nelson also questions our desire to seek authenticity in external presentation, but in a manner entirely different from his paintings. In his "Electric Chair Cuts," he satirizes the notion that we are all only a haircut away from possessing a sense of authenticity that distances us from the crowd. He straps a willing accomplice into a chair, and with a pair of amplified scissors attached by wires to a power-pack on his back, attacks the unruly mane of hair. By theatricalizing the "performance" of a haircut, Nelson suggests that the codes of individuality as filtered through fashion, are just that -- theater. In Nelson's knowing hands, the boundary between the external and the internal shed their dichotomous nature, becoming a single route to a reinvestigation of the self.