Medusa, the Mask and the Buddha (with Claude Cahun), 2019 - 2022

For several years now, Sherry Wiggins has been engaged in a research and embodiment practice with French feminist surrealist writer, performance artist and photographer Claude Cahun (1894 – 1954). Cahun made a series of remarkable black-and-white self-portraits throughout her life, often with her life partner, Marcel Moore, behind the camera.

Wiggins has chosen several of Cahun’s photographic portraits to reenact in collaboration with photographer Luís Branco. Wiggins inserts herself into images that mirror Cahun’s. In the first of these works, My Claude / My Medusa, Wiggins enacts one of Cahun’s early portraits from 1914, when Cahun was just twenty years old. When Wiggins and Branco created their image, Wiggins was sixty-three. Wiggins was shocked when she first saw the images, thinking, ‘Oh, my god, I look like Medusa.’ Wiggins subsequently composed a poem about the experience. She exhibited both portraits—hers and Cahun’s—along with the poem in the exhibit Pink Progression Collaborations at the Arvada Center for the Arts in Arvada, Colorado.

In another series, Wiggins dons a black-and-white mask, similar to the mask Cahun wears in a semi-nude portrait from 1929. Here, Wiggins wears black clothing and inhabits an art deco room. Wiggins and Branco also riff on Cahun’s 1927 portrait as the Buddha. Here, Wiggins cloaks herself in a silver cape and heavy silver makeup and performs her own (kind of wild) Buddha in the triptych My Claude My Buddha I, II, III.

(photography by Luís Branco, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore)