Modern culture is deeply interested in constructed and changing identities. The mutability of the individual is an obsession that stretches from stories about Leonardo Da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" being a portrait of the artist in drag to Oprah Winfrey's very public weight-loss programs; from Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura's self portraits as celebrities from the arts and entertainment worlds to the bizarre transformations of Michael Jackson.
Though this fascination is often drawn to spectacle, it is also part of quotidian life -- from the airs we put on to the brands we sport. It may feel counterintuitive to think that our own identities are constructed -- that we are actually acting according to self-projections of who we want be rather than are -- but social and cultural identities are so influential that a host of personas often coalesce into a single individual with relative ease.
So then, if, after you saw her exhibition "Masquerade," photographer Tomoko Sawada told you she wasn't really feeling herself today, it probably wouldn't come as much of a surprise. The 10-year retrospective of her photography shows her in the guise of at least 420 different self-created identities.