Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks is the catalogue for Wearing's first North American retrospective, tracing three decades of practice through which she has consistently destabilised the boundary between public confession and constructed identity.
About This Book
Since her emergence in the 1990s, Gillian Wearing has worked at the intersection of portraiture, performance, and surveillance culture — producing photographs and videos that draw confessions and psychological revelations from strangers, collaborators, and herself. This retrospective catalogue maps the full arc of that practice: from her earliest Polaroids and videos through to large-scale photographic self-portraits in which she inhabits the guise of other artists, and her investigations into AI-generated selfhood. In an era preoccupied with self-presentation, identity construction, and the image as social currency, Wearing's work reads less like art history than like a precise diagnosis of contemporary visual culture.
Key Features
- 192 pages of full-colour reproductions spanning Wearing's photographic and video practice
- Essays by co-curators Jennifer Blessing and Nat Trotman surveying Wearing's complete oeuvre
- A "self-interview" by Wearing providing a firsthand account of her artistic process and ongoing projects
- Notable works documented include the Lockdown self-portrait series, the ongoing Your Views (2013–), and the AI video work Wearing, Gillian (2018)
- Published by Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2018
What You'll Discover
- How Wearing's engagement with masks — literal and metaphorical — connects traditions of portraiture from Sander and Weegee to Arbus with the contemporary logic of the selfie and reality television
- The evolution of her self-portrait practice, including large-scale works in which she appears in the physical guise of other artists, collapsing authorship and identity
- Her prescient engagement with AI technology as a tool for exploring self-representation, examined through the 2018 video work Wearing, Gillian
- The candour and psychological intensity that define her documentary approach, rooted in chance encounters with ordinary people whose confessions she captures on camera
About the Author
Gillian Wearing is one of the most influential conceptual artists of her generation, first gaining recognition in the 1990s for photographs and videos documenting the confessions and interactions of people she encountered through chance meetings. Her practice has since expanded to encompass large-scale self-portraiture, public sculpture, and explorations of AI technology as a medium for examining identity.
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 192
- Dimensions: 264mm x 203mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9780892075584
- Publisher: Guggenheim Museum Publications
- Publication Date: 2018
Perfect For: Curators, photographers, and artists working with identity and portraiture; students and academics in contemporary art and visual culture; anyone interested in how technology has reshaped self-representation from the confessional video to the selfie.