There is an unspoken hierarchy in most art galleries: The viewer is subordinate to the artist, who commands the space. However, upon entering the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art’s (BMoCA) spring exhibition, the first thing you see isn’t work from one of its seven featured artists. Instead, it’s your own blurred reflection staring back at you beneath the exhibition’s title, Performing Self.
The clever entry immediately abolishes this antiquated perception, placing the viewer on the same plane as the artists. As you explore the ways in which these artists express their performances of self, you can’t help but reflect on your own.
“It’s an invitation for the audience to participate,” says Jane Burke, BMoCA’s curator. “This is my way of having people recognize that we all perform a version of ourselves — many versions of selves.”
The ongoing group show is an exploration into seven artists’ reflections on their projections of identity. Stretching across six installations, the exhibition features a balanced mix of mediums, including painting, sculpture, video and photography.
Among these diverse works is a collection of photographs by Sherry Wiggins and Luís Filipe Branco. It features nine images of Wiggins portraying either Cleopatra or the Egyptian goddess Isis, who signifies love and fertility.
This work on display represents only a fragment of a much larger ongoing series called The Heroines Project, started by Boulder-based artist Wiggins and Portuguese photographer Branco in 2021. In it, Wiggins researches various female historical, mythical and literary characters like the biblical Eve, Aphrodite and Helen of Troy, then embodies them to be photographed by Branco.
“I go into a kind of very introspective state with these women where I sort of empathize and channel them and see how they’ve been represented in these often misogynist ways,” Wiggins says. “It’s really a delving into women throughout history. That’s my inspiration.”
Much of Wiggins’ work is predominantly shot in Branco’s home country of Portugal. They’ve been working as creative partners since 2015, and Wiggins describes the spirit of collaboration between them as kismet. One of the photo series at BMoCA presents Wiggins as Cleopatra wielding a snake and staring at the lens head-on in anguish against a brilliant blue sky, and Branco brought it to life with the perfect shot.
“I was leaning over this concrete wall and Luis was down on the ground lying flat. I was hanging over this concrete wall and I hurt my rib, and he caught that,” Wiggins says. “That action just seems perfect because Cleopatra has gone through so much agony in her representations.”
‘This expansive lens’
Though Wiggins’ and Branco’s partnership produced a compelling body of work, most of the exhibition was produced by solo artists. One of them is Noa Fodrie, a current MFA student at CU Boulder.
To create her paintings, she follows a precise set of rules, starting with a dance — alone, usually nude. This part is only for her. (“You’re not that lucky,” she says.) The process is meant to help her fully occupy her body. Then, she lays different still photos of this dance on top of each other and paints what she sees. The result is an arrangement of warm, neutral colors in a composition that is abstract yet illustrative of the flowing movement of her body.
For Fodrie, this ritual is an act of reclaiming her identity. As a biracial woman, she says she often feels forced to choose parts of herself without being allowed to fully personify every facet. In her art, she is an entire being.
“I think for a long time, I lost my ability to be present for the sake of perseverance,” Fodrie says. “But now I get to exist fully in myself — feeling safe in my body, while dealing with all the lovely, lovely bullshit that comes out of [other people’s] mouths, without sacrificing myself in the process.”
And as if sorting through all the various performances of self in our daily lives isn’t difficult enough, social media and technology has added an entirely new dimension. A reflective “selfie wall” at the start of the exhibition invites audiences to perform, with the museum itself as a backdrop.
This is exactly what Burke aims to examine in collaboration with curator and educator Sharifa Lafon in a March 14 panel discussion titled Simulated Selves. The talk, led by Lafon and researchers from CU Boulder, will weigh the implications of performance in the digital age.
“It will bring in just another dynamic of artists who are working with and looking at the ways in which technology overlays the performance itself,” Lafon says. “Within the context of online spaces, or through communications on the internet, that just kind of adds an additional dialogue to those who are doing it in their daily lives.”
Overall, Burke hopes the exhibition and talk will bring a new introspective lens to the precariousness of the ever-evolving daily performances that make us who we are.
“I think it’s really playful. I hope that visitors go away thinking more about themselves in a way that’s more gentle or more exploratory,” Burke says. “It’s supposed to be really celebratory, and not in a way that’s judgmental. To me, it’s really important to have this expansive lens about all of us. We’re all capable of this. And I hope it is empowering.”
ON VIEW: Simulated Selves: Panel Discussion. 5:30 p.m. Thursday, March 14, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, 1750 13th St. $15
