Post All Hallows Eve, let’s take a look and the ridiculously talented photographer, Cindy Sherman. I was first introduced to her work as a student at Peddie. My favorite and my best art teacher somehow got her publicist to curate a show at Peddie and she actually came and chatted with us for a bit. It was pretty magical.
Sherman was born in the 50s and is a north jersey girl through and through. Studied art at a state college, majored in painting. She said she found painting frustrating, and found it limiting for the stories she wanted to tell. “There is nothing more to say through painting,” so she pivoted to photography and quickly focused on self portraiture. She poked at all of the codes of visual art and quickly became a part of a group of photographers in the 70s who were responding to the wild shift in mass media, technology, film making, and photography. She was particularly aware of the confluence of cinema and photography and how closely they were connected. She seemed to really love how technology was leveling the playing field for making art. The idea that you could shoot a roll of film, take it to the neighborhood mall, and get it back in an hour, was, in her view, a remarkable shift in art history.
She was always interested in experimenting with different identities in her self portraiture. “I wish I could treat every day as Halloween, and get dressed up and go out into the world as some eccentric character.” Her first major body of work titled, you guessed it, “Untitled Film Stills,” rocked the art world in 1977. She had this rad concept of putting on guises and photographing herself in various settings with the idea of choosing props and scenes that resembled b-level movies. She began this project when she was 23 (call me madly jealous that she sorted this out at such a young age), and the resulting work focused on certain types of personalities. The “jaded seductruss,” the “unhappy housewife,” the “jilted lover,” or the “vulnerable naif.” This work was also a remarkable examination of the male gaze, and what that meant in the art world and the emerging feminist movement. What I so, so love about this work is that she leaned into classic Hollywood cinematic conventions and in some ways was making the dopest movie posters of all time. In that way, and many others, she broke new ground in the concept of performance art.
She pushed this concept further in the 80s and 90s and the resulting work is more conceptual, more visceral, heavier, more grotesque, and far more complicated. “I’m disgusted with how people get themselves to look beautiful, I’m much more fascinated with the other side. I feel I'm anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren't self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear.”
