Lecturer Irina Kulik will discuss how artists explore identity issues using the art of impersonation and switching between reality and fantasy.
Grayson Perry (b. 1960) won the Turner Prize in 2003 for his work with ceramics. His vases have classical forms and are decorated in bright colors, depicting subjects at odds with their attractive appearance, such as child abuse and sado-masochism. There is also a strong autobiographical element in his work. Perry realized he was a transvestite in his teens and famously collected the Turner Prize as his alter-ego Claire. He tells his personal coming-of-age story in the autobiographical Grayson Perry: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl (2007). Perry graduated from Portsmouth Polytechnic with a degree in fine art in 1982. He subsequently studied pottery and exhibited his first work in London in 1983. As well as ceramics, Perry has worked in printmaking, drawing, embroidery and other textile work as well as film and performance.
McDermott & McGough (David McDermott, b. 1952, and Peter McGough, b. 1958) is a New York based duo of visual artists. Their collaboration began in 1980, marked by a mutual interest in archaic photographic processes (including the cyanotype, salt, platinum and palladium techniques) which has become their signature style. In the 1980s, McDermott & McGough turned their own lives into an artistic project, starting to dress in late 19th and early 20th century costumes, wearing Victorian top hats and detachable collars, and even transformed their East Village townhouse into a stylistic and technological anachronism, using candles instead of electricity. The artists create painterly and photographic portraits representing themselves as men of various historic epochs. The same can be said of their films, which are set in any but contemporary periods. McDermott & McGough are also known for attaching false dates to their works, meaning their experiments with different aesthetic paradigms go as far as simulating the documentation of history itself.
