After stops at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., galleries in Boston, Charlotte, N.C., and Florence, Italy, and two weeks at Ithaca College's Handwerker Gallery, the artist Jason Dilley's startling exhibit on the faces and voices of AIDS,Project Face to Face, will open at the art gallery in Willard Straight Hall at Cornell Feb. 23 and stay through March 6.

Project Face to Face is an interactive, multimedia exhibit that tells the story of people from all walks of life with a single common bond -- AIDS. The exhibit presents the masks and voices of men and women, blacks and whites, the young and old, straight and gay -- all who are living with AIDS. So the bloodless, faceless statistics -- the hundreds of thousands of dead, the millions living with the disease, the millions infected with HIV all over the world -- seem almost to breathe.

The project began in 1988, after Dilley had been a volunteer at San Francisco General Hospital and suddenly had an idea to do a project of people living with AIDS.

"Most Americans have never met a person with AIDS," said Dilley. "This exhibit gives each viewer an opportunity to 'meet' a person with AIDS. Each hand-crafted life mask is exhibited above a tape recorder, allowing the viewer to look into another human being's face and hear, in the person's own words, the reality of living with AIDS. It's a powerful experience and the results are deeply moving. Their faces and stories breathe life into an experience most Americans know only from one-dimensional newspaper articles and sensationalized talk shows."

"It's almost like having time to converse with real people," said a student at Northeastern University in Boston. "There's a note of hope as we hear how many have become aware of the preciousness of life."

A teacher who brought her class to the exhibit said, "Observing students as they entered the exhibit, listened to the voices, and as they exited, it became ultimately clear that none of our previous attempts at AIDS education even approached the impact of Project Face to Face. The moments in the gallery with the masks and the interviews made what had been a statistical and unreal disease for other people come alive in a very close, very personal way."

"Dilley's work offers a distinctly different educational perspective," said Nina Cummings, a health educator at Cornell's Gannett Clinic. "Project Face to Face is about feelings, not about statistics or basic HIV information. It gives the viewer a chance to feel something, to learn from others whose life experiences contribute to our own understanding about this epidemic. As we meet the individuals who are a part of Project Face to Face, we feel their strength, their spirit and their humanity. It is both the individuals' feelings and the emotions we experience as we listen to their voices that help us grow."

In each city where Project Face to Face has been shown, Dilley has made face castings and recorded the oral histories of local residents who are living with AIDS, which become part of the permanent exhibit. Dilley was in Ithaca Feb. 5 to 10, making new casts and recording oral histories.

Dilley's similar exhibit, "Unheard Voices," using the oral histories, face casts and one full-body cast of people who are survivors of sexual assault, was exhibited at Cornell in November 1996.

The AIDS exhibit is a collaborative venture between Cornell, Ithaca College, AIDSWork of Tompkins County and the Southern Tier AIDS Program.

For more information, contact Nina Cummings at (607) 255-4782; e-mail nc18@cornell.edu.

At its deepest level, Dilley's exhibit shows us something quite strange and very familiar -- our common humanity.