Page 63 - World of Art Contemporary Art magazine: The 2023 Guggenheim issue

Gillian Wearing in collaboration with Wieden+Kennedy, Wearing, Gillian,
2018. Color video, with sound, 5 min. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Council,
2019.67. © Gillian Wearing, courtesy Maureen Paley, London; Tanya
Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles; and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

street photography and performance art by giving voice television can conjure worlds that, while completely
to the subjects of her images. This series established fabricated, still carry real emotional weight. Since 1996
Wearing’s long-standing practice of engaging the public she has cast professional actors in her videos in addition
through classified ads, casting calls, or direct solicitation to working with nonactors. Her interest in the methods
on the street in order to create platforms where people’s and effects of dramatic acting extend naturally from her
often very personal stories could be shared with a wider examinations into the everyday performance of public
audience. life. On stage, emotional authenticity can be scripted and
Wearing has also repeatedly turned the camera on herself rehearsed, and actors often redirect personal experiences
to examine the ways one’s sense of self is established to express a character’s truth. At the same time, victims of
within familial, social, and historical contexts, especially trauma sometimes recount their stories as though reading
in the aftermath of traumatic experience. Through a script. This paradoxical relationship between acted and
her extensive interrogation of the self-portrait, she actual reality underlies many of Wearing’s works, including
has pointedly expanded on Andy Warhol’s notion that her video We Are Here (2014). Wearing set this film in the
“everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes,” predicting West Midlands of England, where she grew up, working
the rise of selfie culture. In addition to performing versions in locations that were of personal significance to her and
of herself, she has engaged with images of people who with local residents, who are cast as ghosts and deliver
are closely connected to her identity as a person and as haunting monologues recounting their regrets, losses, and
an artist. In her photographic series Spiritual Family (2008– guilt. We Are Here screens through April 2, on Saturdays
present), for instance, she employs silicon prosthetics, continuously from 12 to 5 pm in the museum’s New Media
wigs, and lighting to disguise herself as pivotal figures from Theater.
art history who have been foundational influences on her In recent years Wearing has incorporated digital
practice. technologies into her photography and video while
Wearing has long been fascinated by the ways film and also extending her practice to the mediums of painting,

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