Since photography’s beginnings, artists have used their own body and self-image as subject matter, some turning it into the very basis of their practice. Photography has always been inter-twined with the human propensity to look at others, the latter’s voyeurism taking over only where the photographer’s gaze leaves off. This exhibition, drawn from the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, presents works by acclaimed Canadian and international artists who explore the space between their own selves and that of another, expanding identity into the realm of role-playing through self-portraiture.

Perhaps no artist has more comprehensively examined the relationship between the camera and its propensity to objectify its subject than Cindy Sherman. The prominent American artist first framed herself in the role of a young Hollywood starlet caught in the gendered stereotypes of fame in Untitled Film Stills (1977–80), and has since conceived of a wide range of characters laden with conflicting and often conflicted tropes of femininity. At times, her guises can be both carnal and carnivalesque, such as her 2003–4 series of clowns that take the idea of getting “made-up” into realms at once hysterical and sardonic.

In 1985, Yasumasa Morimura came to prominence through his photo-based series Art History in which he donned cosmetics and costumes to insert his presence into staged appropriations of canonical works of Western art. The Japanese artist was fully aware of the debt of influence he owed to Sherman, a declaration made forth rightly in To My Little Sister: For Cindy Sherman (1998) in which Morimura, in female dress, lies flat on the floor and poses in respectful mimicry of Sherman’s Centrefolds series (1981).

Photography’s complicity in constructing and disseminating ideals of identity were the basis for a self-reflexive engagement with the camera lens on the part of many artists in the 1980s and ‘90s. General Idea—the Canadian artist collective comprised of AA Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal—used photography to create endless self-portraits as anything but themselves in order to assert their presence in the art world and broader society. Their works in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, such as Playing Doctor (1991), drew early attention to the AIDS virus that would later claim the lives of Partz and Zontal.

A pop-meets-politics sensibility informs Shelley Niro’s wryly-staged 1992 self-portrait as Marilyn Monroe in the infamous scene from Seven Year Itch (1955) in which the actress stands on a subway grate coyly attempting to hold her dress down. In 500 Year Itch, the Indigenous (Mohawk) artist trumps Monroe’s pin-up persona with her own, sporting a blonde wig, eyeglasses, gaudy jewellery, and sultry if exaggerated makeup, while holding the camera’s shutter release in an overt nod to reclaiming the native body and its history of photographic objectification.

Ties between photography, ancestry, and history are the premise for the Chilean-Canadian Jewish photographer Rafael Goldchain’s prominent I Am My Family series (1999–2001). In his photographs Goldchain meticulously represents himself as his next of kin through the ages, many of whom were displaced through traumatic upheavals in 20th-century Europe. Employing elaborate research, costuming, and props, Goldchain brings his family album to life in a way that emphasizes the connection between himself and his lineage.

The intimacy of family ties—a father’s love and pride over his newborn daughter—underlines Sophie Calle’s La fille du docteur (1991), an artist’s book that documents Calle’s time spent working as a stripper in one of her more audacious role-playing performances. The French artist’s reputation and influence turn on the deep commitment she has made over the years in embodying and enacting the roles she assumes.

This exhibition is book-ended by two works that could not be more disparate in terms of scale and personality. Bill Burke’s diminutive Portrait of the Artist as a Young Tree (1969) flanks the artist’s body against a forest of old-growth trees in what might be read as an homage to the American photographer’s own spiritual mythos and inherited Buddhism. In contrast, Rodney Graham’s The Gifted Amateur, Nov. 10th, 1962 (2007) is a theatrically grandiose triptych. The Vancouver artist stages himself as the late American abstract painter Morris Louis (1912–1962) at work in his suburban home that doubled as his studio. The triptych speaks to Graham’s fascination with Louis’ work and the transformation of the suburbs—a place often associated with generic architecture and cookie-cutter aesthetics—into a space of artistic creativity.

Each of the photographs in this exhibition, despite their guises and disguises, reveal deep personal and aesthetic analyses of identity and representation. These artists share the desire to envelop themselves in the role of another, in the complex process of becoming wholeheartedly “In Character.”

Curated by Bonnie Rubenstein and Jonathan Shaughnessy