This artist appears naked and ‘births’ sparklers, but you won’t see her face

There’s a compelling contradiction underscoring the work of US performance artist Narcissister. While she gleefully plays with nudity, sexuality and revelation, “birthing” phones or sparklers from various orifices, she does so while wearing variations on a distinctive plastic mask. Few artists are so deliberately on display while also keeping their real identity a secret.

She’ll be in Melbourne as part of this year’s Rising festival, performing her large-scale work Voyage Into Infinity with two other performers as well as one of her solo shows, Forever Young. Don’t expect her to whip off that mask during curtain call.

It comes as a massive shock, then, when our video chat reveals not only Narcissister’s real name but her unadorned face as well. She falls into laughter at my surprise: “That would be really extra if I were to wear a mask for a situation like this.”

And yet, from her first public appearance, the character of Narcissister has never appeared without the mask. The fact that we don’t know who is behind it is key to the character’s uncanny power. “From the beginning I knew that I wanted to be masked. Probably six months into the project, I realised that this mask that I’m using is the face of the character.”

Narcissister’s provocative performances screw around with conventions of beauty, gender, race and other forms of identity, exposing the precarious foundations on which our self-definition rests. Her short film Breast Work, for instance, explores the ambivalent feelings surrounding female toplessness outside of the areas policed by our culture (The Huffington Post called her the “topless feminist superhero of New York”). Another work, Marilyn, reveals how the artist transforms herself into a simulation of the titular bombshell through artifice alone.

“We all know this idea that identity is a performance of some kind,” she says. “We’re all performing in many ways at every time, at every moment, even when you said to me, ‘Oh, you’re not masked.’ I’m not literally masked right now, but clearly I’m wearing a mask and so are you. I’m interested in highlighting all of that in both subtle and more intense, very direct ways in my work.”

The masks in question hail from the early 1960s, and their design “really embodies the standard beauty ideals of that time, the wide-set eyes and the pointy nose and the prim mouth,” says Narcissister.

She first happened upon them while doing window display design and quickly began incorporating them into her work. Once Narcissister began to achieve success in the American art scene, she began to investigate the provenance of the face that was becoming part of her brand.

She discovered they were the brainchild of Verna Doran, part of a husband-and-wife team who ran a company named Plastic Personalities in mid-century Los Angeles. “I found that she would’ve been in her early 90s, and I thought maybe she’s still alive. I thought: Narcissister has to meet her maker.”

As fate would have it, Doran died a month before Narcissister was able to track her down. She formed a connection with her daughter, though, who provided the origin story of Narcissister’s face. “Her mother was like a dumpster diver of her time. She would go to estate sales in the Los Angeles area after they had closed, and she would go through the dumpsters to pick out whatever was left. Something she loved collecting was mannequins, so the face is modelled after one of these mannequins that she pulled out of a dumpster.”

The emptiness of the mannequin’s gaze is what lends Narcissister’s performances their unsettling aspect. In a 1906 essay the psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch described how mannequins, dolls and waxwork figures give rise to a sense of the uncanny, since we’re never quite sure they’re not about to spring to life. Narcissister is just that: the display doll that looks back at you.

The artist often describes Narcissister as a character, but she’s not exactly that. She doesn’t have a backstory, a consistent personality or stable set of interests. She’s not even confined to one body: the upcoming Voyage Into Infinity sees three Narcissisters sharing the stage.

“That’s something that’s very interesting about the mask. It makes me and the other performers a mirror of some kind that reflects back to the viewer what they’re projecting onto the character.”

Narcissister’s shows might be in-your-face, but they’re also about the baggage you bring to them. “If and when there are political statements in my work, it’s mostly for people to interpret from the outside.”

For Voyage Into Infinity, a huge contraption of recycled materials is set in motion by the trio of masked Narcissisters, with pyrotechnics, live music and the ever-present threat that this finely calibrated machine will go off the rails. One review called it “Rube Goldberg Punk Rock,” but the sense of chaos is counterbalanced by careful control. The artist behind the mask originally trained as a dancer at the acclaimed Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, and approaches every work with the discipline learned there.

“I don’t do the kind of performance art that’s improvised. Everything that I do is very choreographed. The rigour of that past experience as a professional dancer is still very apparent in my work and in my approach to performance.”

You could see Voyage Into Infinity as a kind of choreography for inanimate objects, but the Narcissisters are very much at the work’s core. The piece is in part a response to the 1987 art film The Way Things Go, but where that Rube Goldbergesque construction hid the hands of its (white, male) makers, Narcissister “wanted the female performers front and centre”.

As with her solo works, costuming was vital to Voyage Into Infinity. “One of the tools that we use to perform whatever identity we’re aiming to project is our clothing.”
She had a few ideas about how these Narcissisters would be dressed. “One was the professional, powerful woman wearing a power suit. A pencil skirt and a blazer and stockings and heels.”

As it turned out, women’s professional attire is too restrictive to manoeuvre around a complex machine. Narcissister headed in another direction. “I got this idea: maybe they could be like dolls, like the iconic white doll, the brown doll, and the Black doll. It just felt right. The girlhood or the femininity of the costume contrasting with this big machine that has rough aesthetics and is at a very grand scale. Something about the contrast just felt right, so I went for it.”

Voyage Into Infinity is at Festival Hall on June 4-5, as part of Rising; https://2026.rising.melbourne/.