Curators Jennifer Blessing and Nat Trotman introduce Gillian Wearing’s practice, discuss her focus on the performance of identity, and describe how to navigate the layout of this exhibition.
Jennifer Blessing: I’m Jennifer Blessing, Senior Curator, Photography, at the Guggenheim Museum.
Nat Trotman: I’m Nat Trotman, Curator of Performance and Media at the Guggenheim Museum.
"Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks" takes place in four levels of the Guggenheim’s Tower building. It features over 100 works in photography, video, sculpture, and painting, and includes screenings of the film We Are Here in the museum’s New Media Theater.
Gillian Wearing works primarily in photography and video but in recent years has expanded her practice to include painting and sculpture as well. And in all of her works, she is looking at ways in which each of us, including herself, perform our identities for the world.
Blessing: Wearing is interested in the theater of everyday life and how we present ourselves. She’s been interested in that for a long time. Her work has always looked at that way that we attempt to control how we’re perceived by other people.
Trotman: The exhibition proceeds upwards through the galleries, roughly chronologically, though each of the four galleries includes works from throughout Wearing’s career and is organized around a particular theme.
And a common thread that runs through all the works in the show is the idea of masking, and that’s directly referenced in the title of the exhibition, "Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks". We did not know when we began planning this exhibition how incredibly relevant the idea of masking would come to feel.
In Wearing’s work, masks serve as both a literal prop but also as a metaphor for the ways that we present ourselves to others and shield our true selves from others. What Wearing’s work can offer us now is a more nuanced, complex understanding of how we relate to each other and how to empathize with each other across those boundaries and masks.
