The Many Masked Faces of Gillian Wearing

“We change with what we wear,” says the British artist Gillian Wearing, who has spent her career investigating the tension between how people present themselves and who they really are. Using physical masks, AI, and Photoshop, Wearing turned herself into a succession of characters for W—from an old-school star in Chanel, who she imagined was “waiting for her driver to pick her up,” to a mustachioed man in Miu Miu, whose look was inspired by Clark Gable and Tom Selleck. “I wanted the characters to be actors rather than models, so some of the shots feel more performative,” she says, adding that the picture in which she wears a Dior dress and clutches her head felt particularly intense. “I think of it as an image of someone looking lost, or someone who has lost something.”

Wearing is known for groundbreaking pieces such as 60 Minutes Silence, a video of rows of British police posing as if for a photograph, which won her the Turner Prize in 1997. Her sculpture of the suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett, on display in London’s Parliament Square, is the first statue of a woman at the epicenter of the British political establishment. During the pandemic, Wearing painted remarkable self-portraits in watercolors and oils, and last year she used AI to make an unsettling work called Imagined Mask of Joan Crawford as Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, in which the two Hollywood rivals were morphed together in a DALL-E 2–generated face that seemed at once comical and anguished. Her latest exhibition, “Reflections,” which includes an AI-assisted video called Wearing Gillian and a photograph in which she appears as the Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi, is currently on view at Regen Projects, in Los Angeles.

Wearing has used masks since 1994, when she created a piece titled Confess All on Video. Don’t Worry You Will Be in Disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian. In it, 10 masked members of the British public admitted to behavior ranging from stealing to putting scabs on their boss’s pizza. The masks featured in this shoot, however, are not entirely about obscuring identities. “I wanted the photographs to initially not look like they are me in disguise,” Wearing says. “We can think of masks as being scary, unnerving. I wanted them to look more human. My shoot is meant to suggest how people might wear the clothes.”

To that end, Wearing is a sophisticated Nordic blonde draped in Bottega Veneta, and an intellectual with a searching gaze in Prada. Another vignette sees her as two women, wearing Molly Goddard and Max Mara, one reading to the other: “two characters absorbed with one another and in their own world,” Wearing says. “The woman reading is older, so she could be the mother of the younger one, or a friend. You can’t tell if the younger woman is bored, sleepy, or just listening. The book is Ingmar Bergman and the Rituals of Art, by Paisley Livingston. Interestingly, chapter one is titled ‘The Artist’s Masks.’ ”

Fashion assistants: Luke Boxall, Hugh Campbell.