Narcissister, my character, employs humor and spectacle to explore gender, racial identity, and sexuality. As Narcissister, I wear stripper gear, pneumatic breasts, outlandish wigs, and trompe l’oeil costumes to deconstruct stereotypical representations. By opening up and turning against themselves what Jamaican-born British cultural theorist Stuart Hall calls "fixed and closed stereotypical representations,” I expose, in live performance, video, film, sculpture, and collage, the practice of representation itself, and challenge the audience to question its own enjoyment and titillation.
Through Narcissister, I question fetishism, particularly sexual fetishism, which is notorious in its fixing of racist and gendering stereotypes. Rather than abandon this contaminated site, I dive headlong into the muck, into the depths of the fantasy and fetish itself, to expose and deconstruct their power. Intervening in the exchange between the image and its psychic meaning uncovers the collective fantasies with which we invest these images, and forces representation open.
Narcissister's work, with its unabashed eroticism, questions, rather than provides, titillation. In addition, humor (Narcissister’s key subversive tool) and deliberately shocking vignettes and images resist the easy thrill of unexamined sexuality and self-display.
Both Narcissister’s name and her mask reflect the double dynamic I aim to create with the work. The Narcissister mask is a repurposed wig display form designed in Los Angeles in 1965 by female entrepreneur Verna Doran. Falling within the narrow conception of femininity and beauty currently predominant in the culture, the mask draws in the viewer; simultaneously, the mask – a tool for acquiring and establishing superiority and separation – pushes the viewer away. Similarly, the name Narcissister, while evoking the dysfunction of narcissism, also connotes – through humorous punning – both sisterhood and concerns beyond the self. Self-absorption thus gives way to self-scrutiny through an expansive collection of characters that are both culturally significant and culturally debased.
My passion for Narcissister reflects the strong link between my own background and my interests in the themes embodied in and by the character. Narcissister’s strong feminine presence and confrontation of sexual and racial stereotypes is grounded in my own feminism and background as a African American/Sephardic Jewish woman. Always staying true to her essential self (a self obscured by the mask), Narcissister enacts the shifting and changing of roles and identities skillfully and gracefully, a nod to the need to accept and surrender to impermanence (a belief I have practiced in my study of Buddhism). Wearing the mask, and portraying a variety of roles, Narcissister provides me a visceral and kinesthetic experience of seeing the world through another's eyes, of seeing another point of view, thereby allowing for a broader transpersonal experience.
-Narcissister 2020
Photo: Tony Stamolis