How do we see ourselves?  How do others see us?
It is impossible to single out one consistent identity, as we all inevitably adopt multiple roles. A few common ones include inquisitive student, sage teacher, rebellious child, responsible parent, savvy professional, bewildered traveler. Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, Cindy Sherman brings together work by three twentieth-century artists who indefatigably explore questions of identity through self-portrayals in photographs or on film. Assuming different guises, they act out various roles, both real and imagined. Born in different countries, in different generations—Cahun in France in 1894, Deren in Russia in 1917, and Sherman in the United States in 1954—all three fracture a single, solitary sense of self, instead proposing identity as multiple projections of invented, fictional selves. Exploiting the theatricality inherent in photographic media, they adopt personae from diverse cultures, historical moments, and fictional narratives. Catapulting themselves into past and future, they overturn accepted distinctions between illusion and reality. Inverted Odysseys includes Cahun's private "performances" for the camera, Deren's experimental films and photographic works, and Sherman's film stills and color photographs, bringing into clearer focus their inventive manipulations of conventional dress codes and their multifaceted strategies of masquerade.

 Derived from Deren's characterization of her film At Land as an "inverted odyssey," the exhibition's title implies a merging of divergent environments, including internal and external landscapes. With the emergence of photography as a popular medium in the second half of the nineteenth century, individuals could literally inject themselves into different settings and scenes. This flexibility is particularly evident in early photographic portraits. Whether sitters chose to be photographed in "straight" portraits or to dress up as favorite characters, they learned to pose—like actors—in elaborately furnished stage sets, exchanging private faces for public personae.

 At the same time, these radically changing possibilities for representation were intimately linked to the widening of cultural boundaries through international expositions and increased travel. Today, at the turn of the millennium, photographic media and computer technologies—such as interactive videos and the Internet superhighway—continue to expand imaginative frontiers, transporting voyagers into virtual worlds. Inverted Odysseys proposes that the concept of multiple selves advocated by Cahun, Deren, and Sherman is more than a feminist or a psychological issue. As cocurator Shelley Rice has asserted, "The playful, imaginative urge to 'try on' the roles we see in pictures, in films, in travels, or in literature—to become a medieval princess or a Buddha or a witch—is central to the workings of our global culture, to our social definitions of human identity in a world where each individual exists in a multicultural and multitemporal environment."