I’m in Training (with Claude Cahun), 2025

Sherry Wiggins and photographer Luís Branco have been working on an ongoing project called I’m in Training (with Claude Cahun), a series of performative photographs that are in direct conversation with early-twentieth-century French artist Claude Cahun (1894 – 1954). Cahun, along with her life partner, Marcel Moore, created remarkable photographic “self” portraits. Cahun was an intellectual, an accomplished writer, a photographer and a performance artist. She was also a Jewish, lesbian anti-Nazi activist. Wiggins considers Cahun a queer superheroine and engages in dialogue with her concerning the performance of identity and gender in life and in photographic portraiture.

With I’m in Training (with Claude Cahun), Wiggins stages herself as the subject in performative portraits that reference many of Cahun’s photographic works. In the series Don’t Kiss Me, Wiggins dons a body builder’s costume akin to the costume worn by Cahun in her 1927 portraits (with hearts painted on her cheeks, lifting a fake dumbbell). Wiggins is masked and wears a debonaire black-and-white jacket for the series I’ve been thinking about Claude Cahun. She dresses as an art deco devil for the series As the Devil, paying homage to Cahun’s performance as the Devil in an avant-garde play in Paris in 1929. For the performative portraits As a Gentleman (masked) and unmasked, Wiggins has shaved her head and appears as a dandy, much like Cahun’s 1920’s portrait. In What do you want from me? Wiggins faces her gender ambiguous doubled self in reference to Cahun’s work titled Que me veux tu? In the portrait Gilded, Wiggins, her face shining with gold makeup, peers pensively through a window covered by a grid of wrought iron bars.

Wiggins and Branco created these works and many others while working as artists in residence at La Napoule Art Foundation on the French Riviera.

(photography by Luís Branco, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore)