For local painter Joyce Werwie Perry, art is all about emotion.

Perry is best known for creating a palette-knife technique in which she rapidly applies and removes oil paint with knives. The technique allows a painter to work quickly and expressively, using obvious brush strokes to blend colors and create a thick and uneven surface.

“It’s like playing in the paint,” Perry said from le Poire, her studio and gallery space in the West End neighborhood of Pittsburgh. “[The technique] was started to bring more immediacy to the work, and some emotion.”

It’s a slight surprise, then, that one of Perry’s favorite pieces to appear in “Who, Me?” an upcoming exhibition she juried for Sweetwater Center for the Arts, features the self-portrait of a woman who appears, more or less, indifferent.

Painted on a 3-by-4-foot canvas, a blond woman in a blue sweater stands in a slouched, three-quarter pose and stares without expression at an undefined point in front of her.

The painting, by Sonja Sweterlitsch, is simply titled “Self Portrait,” and is one of the 26 pieces Perry selected for the exhibition.

Comprised entirely of self-portraits, “Who, Me?” asks its audience to consider what art reveals about those who create it. It was Perry’s hope that, in asking artists to create a work that reveals some aspect of their character, they might discover something new about themselves.

Works feature the use of oil paint, watercolor, charcoal, wood, steel, acrylic, and bronze and represent a variety of mediums. Most of them were created by artists from Pennsylvania.

“I thought it would be an interesting idea for the artists to create a self portrait, whether in their own image or of something that’s important to them and be able to explain it,” Perry said.

Artists' statements will hang alongside each piece, allowing artists to use their own words to explain their inspirations and what the work ultimately reveals about them as people, and as artists.

“A lot of times art is left for open interpretation, and it still will be, but this way you have a little bit of insight into what the artist was thinking when they were actually creating the piece,” said Sara Welte, artistic director at Sweetwater.

Sweterlitsch’s seemingly impassive portrait first caught Perry’s eye for its technical beauty, but it was the artist’s description that held her interest.

“The shadow across my face and hesitancy in my eyes communicate my ambivalence of being both the viewer and the object viewed,” Sweterlitsch writes.

“Who, Me?” runs from Saturday through Feb. 26 at Sweetwater and is free to the public. An opening reception will take place from 7 to 9 p.m. Saturday.