Masked Identities an Exhibition by Jo Sutherst

  • Event details

  • Begins 27 July at 9:00

  • Ends 1 September at 16:00

  • Gallery 41

The endless electronic messages and stimulus we receive from social media and other visual sources cause us to analyse and judge ourselves extensively through the eyes of others. The self is eroded and broken down. As a result, we find ourselves changing who we appear to be to meet the expectations of others. We are expected to play various roles in our lives that cause us to pigeonhole parts of ourselves into characters that overlap. We do not truly know who we are, and we do not have the stability to maintain our identities for long periods of time due to external pressures and expectations.

French theorist, Michel Foucault suggested that we have both a social and personal identity. He proposed that we do not have a real identity inside ourselves, but rather that we have a "rather weak identity, which we attempt to support and to unify under a mask" and he argued that it is necessary to remove "every mask to ultimately disclose an original identity"

In Masked Identities, photographer Jo Sutherst uses performance and masking to explore the ways in which we alter our personal presentation online. Using a series of masks in often banal situations, Sutherst explores the world of our social media generated identities.