Artistic invention thrives in Sublimated Masks at the Museum of Performance + Design, where disguise, illusion, role-playing and high-stakes power games are fantastically translated into expressive, strikingly original, large-scale costumes and fiber sculptures. Latifa Medjdoub developed this menagerie of deluded souls for the Collected Works theater company's revival of French playwright Jean Genet's The Balcony, performed at San Francisco's Old Mint last February.
A French-born, San Francisco-based sculptor, painter and costume designer, Medjdoub was trained in Paris during the 1990s, a fertile period when film, theater, opera and couture artists collaborated on projects and moved freely between mediums. Perhaps owing to that legacy of cross-pollination, she has integrated a variety of genres, tools and techniques in the construction of the 45 giant, exaggerated masked dolls and related imagery that are currently on view. The dramatic creations, made of wool felt that was painted and printed with imagery, were originally designed for the distorted theatrical universe of Genet's story about an armed rebellion in the streets of an unnamed city. The play unfolds mostly within the confines of a brothel, a "house of illusions" that caters to elite clients acting out and projecting their fantasies, while donning grotesque facades of highly placed officials �" judges, generals, regents and bishops �" who wield institutional power in a regime that is falling apart outside the brothel walls.
Although the exhibition is its own world and appreciation of it is not contingent on intimate knowledge of the play, the works, hung on mannequins and walls, do lack a crucial element: human beings to animate them. It's a challenge confronting any show of this kind, but the presence of photographs and video from the production offers some sense of how the costumes looked and moved in the context of performance.
Medjdoub drew upon vintage and digital imagery for the compositions, and imprinted the masks with the faces of the actors who played roles. They seem to look through you, gazing toward the great beyond, and the nose- and eye-holes lend a porcine appearance; pigs at the trough, as it were. A group of revolutionaries wears the masked visage of Genet himself, who advised the play be a "glorification of the Image and the Reflection." Indeed, the brothel, a hall of mirrors, also functions as a meta-theatrical stage where its customers can indulge and realize their innermost desires. Visitors, however, may feel as though they've been abruptly dropped into a scene from Alice in Wonderland, with a cast of menacing irrational protagonists brandishing fetishized objects emblematic of their naked ambition and self-aggrandizing fantasies of status and domination. The costume for the Chief of Police, festooned with badges and medallions, verges on farce, illustrating the character's desire to have not just a single badge, but also a badge from every agency to amplify the awesome power he has acquired. The general's arrogance is parodied with a bevy of medals �" awarded for other people's valor, not his own �" that coalesce into a vulgar cubist display of grandiosity on his chest, topped off by the oversized, lopsided military hat on his head. Another of his vestments is covered in a fruit salad of colored ribbons, epaulets and gold buttons. An imperious female envoy is dressed like a dragon lady in a woven blood-red gown, a soft red cap recalling the dark ministrations of the medieval clergy, her face rouged and disfigured. The Queen's mask encompasses a crown above her head decorated with a tiara and a jewel-encrusted choker around the neck befitting her wealth and rank. It was worn by a performer playing dual roles: the monarch and the whorehouse madam. And then there are the prostitutes, who facilitate and thwart desires. The general's "girl" wears a fuchsia horse head, black stiletto boots, and a shank of horse hair on her hip. Who was riding whom is something you'll be left to ponder. Another "girl" has a crocheted vintage face mask with long horsehair lashes that double as a veil of tears. Her smock, featuring head-shots of Lady Gaga and Amy Winehouse, has a smudged gold design after Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt's oil and gold leaf canvas, "The Kiss."
Some of Medjdoub's big fiber creations served as stationary extras in the production, while others like "The Passage" could be worn. Inhabited by an actress during performances, the latter sculpture, which looks like a once-fashionable Parisian lady gone to seed, tentatively shuffled through the hallways of the Old Mint, a dazed silent witness to the violent events swirling around her.
Latifa Medjdoub: Sublimated Masks, through June 20, Museum of Performance + Design, 893B Folsom St., SF. (415) 255-4800