Cindy Sherman

www.pulodolobo.blogspot.com

Like Cahun and Deren, Cindy Sherman exploits photography's potential for transformation. In her art, she invents roles that range from movie star to witch, Italian gentleman to aristocratic matron. Private points of view merge with public icons of femininity as she convincingly makes illusion her personal reality.
She began her Untitled Film Stills in the late 1970s, after receiving a bachelor of arts degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo and moving to New York City. In these works, Sherman impersonates female character types from various B movies. Composed of sixty-nine stills, the series reprises numerous characters, but Sherman disrupts any possibility of narrative continuity and refuses any link between her heroines' roles and her own subjectivity. In her next and first color series, Sherman again assumed multiple guises in photographs that replace the monochrome of black-and-white films with the technicolor of contemporary television dramas. Both series involve character types and production techniques borrowed from the film industry: Sherman positioned herself in front of a wall in her studio onto which she projected both urban and domestic scenes. Her realization of her first commercial movie, Office Killer, which was released in 1997, can thus be viewed as a logical extension of her early explorations in photography.
In Fairy Tales and History Portraits, two series dating from the mid-1980s, Sherman assumes more specific guises, appropriating characters from well-known stories as well as art history. The heightened theatricality of these scenes turns on their very artificiality. In their staging, Sherman plays with the juxtaposition of the real and the unreal. She presents figures composed of both actual and prosthetic body parts and hidden under thick applications of makeup, encouraging viewers to seek the gaps in her creations.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Sherman received commercial commissions from fashion designers like Jean-Paul Gaultier and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, which not only allowed her work to cross boundaries into mass media but also enabled her to stage an alternative to conventional fashion advertising. Employing props and creating characters, Sherman constructs herself and the mannequins who pose in her place as fanciful, dejected, even grotesque figures. As masterful magician in her use of masquerade, Sherman strives toward artifice that is always multifaceted: she multiplies fiction upon fiction as she reinvents herself through makeup, costumes, and props.
Although the three artists in this exhibition were born and lived in different times and places, they all employ photographic technologies and fanciful costumes not only to turn private visions into public images but also to inject real bodies into elaborate fictions. From Cahun's photographs to Deren's filmic representations to Sherman's virtual landscapes, their work comes full circle. All three artists challenge the notion of fixed identity: they construct, and sometimes as quickly dismantle, relationships among posing body, assumed costume, and surrounding environment. The background street scenes and landscapes seen in Sherman's Untitled Film Stills are not documents of actual sites, but rear projections onto empty walls. As the depths of her compositions reveal only their accretions of fabrications and facades, Sherman materializes what Cahun only hints at in her statement, "Under this mask, another mask. I will never finish lifting up all these faces." All three artists take the ritual of dressing up to extremes. In different ways, they all embrace the possibilities of expanded selves, blurring boundaries between exterior and interior, fact and fiction.