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Arts & Communication Self-portraits as masks

reveal their secrets on camera in a process inspired by reality recreate a black-and-white photograph of her mother as a
television. The video creates an atmosphere of secular young woman (Figure 2). The photograph depicts a smiling
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confession, which loses its sacredness because of the type of young woman in a floral blouse in a half-length, three-
masks used: caricatured reproductions of the faces of public quarter turn. Wearing explains that she found it difficult
figures, flashy wigs, false noses, fake beards, and sunglasses. to recognize her mother in the original photograph, which
The disguises in Confess All on Video sometimes completely was taken before she was born. The peculiarity of the
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cover the face of the interviewee, whereas in other cases they portrait/self-portrait is that it captures both the woman’s
leave the face partially or fully visible – a characteristic that past features and those of her daughter: with this self-
is shared with later works that also focus on the genre of the portrait, Wearing aims to show, through her gaze, her
masked media confession. mother’s light-hearted youth.
The function of the mask is enriched with new The same mechanism is used to reproduce photographs
meanings in Wearing’s artworks of the early 2000s, of her brother, sister, father, uncle, and grandparents –
in which a greater focus on the self can be observed, the vehicle of an investigation that, through the medium
concretized in the development of different types of of photography, intersects with topics such as identity,
disguised self-representation. Prominent among these are memory, and the impermanence of existence. The chosen
the photographs in the Family Album series, a collection images show almost all family members at the same age,
of black-and-white as well as color images, in which between late adolescence and their 20s, which places them
Wearing reinterprets her family tree and reproduces family on the same level, regardless of their role in the family tree.
photographs in the form of self-portraits with elaborate
masks and hyper-realistic silicone wigs. In the series, the artist’s actions do not aim to remove
the identity of her family members but rather to show the
3. Portraying oneself as the other interpenetration between the subjectivities contained in
a single body, represented in its various manifestations.
In one self-portrait in Wearing’s series Self-Portrait as The artist temporarily assumes the identity of another
My Mother Jean Gregory (2003), the artist uses a mask to individual, with whom she shares genetics and certain
physical characteristics, to create the image of a new subject
who combines and adds other attributes to the different
personalities of which she is composed. The subjectivity she
describes and represents is indeed neither her own nor that
of the other relatives: it takes the form of a third simulated
identity, elaborated to confront the ideas of original and
copy, the concepts of past and present, and the family
dynamics that contribute to the definition of the individual.
The performative act of masquerade adopted by the
artist is linked to a tradition of masked portraiture that, in
the contemporary context, has roots in the works of Marcel
Duchamp and Claude Cahun, themselves protagonists of a
series of self-portraits linked to Family Album. Duchamp’s
female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, first assumed a physical
presence in 1921 through photographic portraits created
by Man Ray. These images depict Duchamp in female attire
and posture, a motif that would be replicated in other Man
Ray photographs throughout the 1920s. The pun that
forms Rrose Sélavy’s name recalls the French phrase “Eros,
c’est la vie” (which can be translated as “Eros, such is life”),
an allusion to the erotic sphere. By presenting herself as
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a woman, Duchamp disrupts social norms and ironically
plays with gender roles, creating an alternative identity that
Figure 2. Gillian Wearing, Self Portrait as My Mother Jean Gregory, 2003, is both the protagonist of some works (e.g., Why not sneeze
framed bromide print. Frame: 150 × 131 cm, 59 × 51 5/8 inches. Print: 135 Rrose Sélavy? [1921] and Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette
× 116 cm, 53 1/8 × 45 5/8 inches. © Gillian Wearing, courtesy Maureen
Paley, London, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York and Regen Projects, [1921]) and the author herself (e.g., Fresh Widow [1920]
Los Angeles and Anemic Cinema [1926]). 17,18

doi:
Volume 3 Issue 2 (2025) olume 3 Issue 2 (2025) 3 3 doi: 10.36922/ac.338510.36922/ac.3385
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