Cindy Sherman is a renowned American artist, a significant character in the “Pictures Generation,” a circle of American artists recognized from the early 1980s. Sherman focused her artistic photography on concepts of identity, sexuality, and femininity. This essay documents how Cindy Sherman’s pictures showed the constructiveness of gender through satire.
Sherman recreates the likeness of women from the media through her photographic portraits. Sherman plays with images of femininity to showcase their artificiality. Simply put, “Sherman’s women are not quite women, but images of women” (MEIA students, 2015). Sherman’s work borders on depicting women in the media as figures or tropes. Sherman has also been termed ‘a female-female impersonator’ by creating female archetypes. This she does by turning her face into a mask using excessive makeup. Ideally, Sherman’s work embodies a masking process that proves an individual possesses within themselves the means to create many identities.
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Sherman’s work posits that a person of any gender can wear a layered mask and adapt to any other gender identity. An imitation process begins with a male identity that is continued by adapting to a female identity. The imitation is continued in a photograph and depicted as a fantasy, where underneath the fantasy is the woman, who is again a construct, adapting to identity through transformation (MEIA students, 2015). Sherman’s work was a kind of satire, where she could use masks and makeups to transform herself into the famous people seen in the media.
Conclusively, the work of Cindy Sherman asserted that gender could be constructed. Her work was recognized as it existed in a time of intense consumerism. Sherman used makeup to transform herself into another construct of a woman. Her work meant that anyone could transform themselves into another gender through satire.
Reference
MEIA Students, (2015). Cindy Sherman and the Deconstruction of Gender Identity (Creative Work) http://womenartists-flul.blogspot.com/2015/05/cindy-sherman-and-deconstruction-of.html
