CURATORS Miranda Wallace, Ellie Buttrose OTHER VENUES Queensland Art Gallery|Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 28 May–3 October 2016 SPONSOR EY, Massey University, City Gallery Foundation PUBLICATION publisher Queensland Art Gallery|Gallery of Modern Art; essays Miranda Wallace, Ellie Buttrose, Robert Leonard, Betsy Berne
None of the characters are me.
They’re everything but me.
—Cindy Sherman
She’s good enough to be a real actress.
—Andy Warhol
By constantly manipulating her own image, Cindy Sherman has changed the face of contemporary art. For over forty years, the American photographer has used herself as her own model in staged photos, transforming her appearance through make-up, costumes, wigs, prostheses, and more recently, digital effects.
Her chameleon-like transformations offer a sustained, cutting, and, at times, disturbing investigation of gender, social conditioning, narcissism, and celebrity culture. Her photos have made her one of the world's most influential living artists. Sherman has transformed how we think about photography, especially its role in shaping personal and collective identities. She is as important to pop culture as she is to art history.
Cindy Sherman is a major exhibition of Sherman’s photography since 2000, the moment when she returned to photographing herself after a decade of wilful absenteeism from her own work. It features seven major series where Sherman investigates a range of new and troublesome ‘types’ (socialites, fashion victims, clowns), and includes her collaborations with fashion houses Balenciaga and Chanel. The exhibition showcases Sherman’s embrace of digital technologies to alter the ways she makes and presents her images.
A mammoth, multi-character photographic mural wrapping around one of City Gallery’s spaces exemplifies the range of new and disarming experiences offered by Sherman’s twenty-first-century work.