Inspiration Nation

Unmasked

Welcome to Inspiration Nation: Critic’s Corner, the world’s premier source for arts criticism, awareness, appreciation, and analysis. That’s right—all that, right here, no paywall, and no degree required. Read on for some serious culture.

We’ve all gotten pretty into masks recently. Maybe you landed on this page because you innocently googled how to make your pandemic accessory a little cuter or more comfortable. We don’t have those exact answers here, but your search wasn’t in vain. Gillian Wearing has been preaching the gospel of masks for decades. Surely there’s something we can learn from her!

Playing with the idea of disguise and identity, Gillian Wearing is a conceptual artist working across photo, film, and performance. In our favorite series, she creates masks and poses for self-portraits. She’s been herself at various ages, her uncle, her mother, her brother, and a multitude of famous personalities (Lily Cole, Diane Arbus). If she wasn’t an artist, she might have been a serial killer.

Look at these pictures. They are all Gillian, wearing specially crafted masks, posing as various men in her family. So nuts! Zoom in and check out the one of her brother (shirtless guy). 

A light Google search doesn’t reveal if Wearing is her really truly her last name, but it seems like it? Wild. She was destined to become an intrepid explorer of modern society’s many disguises. 

Selfie SAVANT!!! These are all Gillian, posing as herself at different ages. 

That isn’t all she does. Some of her earlier explorations involved recruiting people via classified ads to be disguised and then confess their secrets on camera. She also had a series in which she stopped strangers on the street and asked them to write down their current feeling and show the camera. That’s how we got this gem:

It doesn’t seem so crazy nowadays, maybe, but she did so much stuff in the eighties and nineties that became our current common language on social media. She’s like a creepier Miranda July (we say this as a point in her favor). It doesn’t come off like she’s trying to be weird for weird’s sake or attention, but that she simply is weird. (Again, we mean this as the highest compliment). 

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