Gillian Wearing’s project is nothing if not consistent. Its conceptual basis, in representing those points where the conscious construction of identity meets a humorously dark, subconscious doppelganger (and so becomes vulnerable), has remained intact since her career’s beginning in the early 1990s; its execution in serial, mostly photographic modes has not changed much either. The sense in her work, emerging both from concept and form, is of a sociological study whose motives are simple and whose execution gains meaning from repetition. And so her most well-known work, Signs That Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs That Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say, was just that: a series of simply-composed photographs in which a chorus of everyday subjects held up handmade signs that described their mind-states. It was this kind of slick ethnography, evocative of Conceptual Art and yet eminently accessible, that cemented Wearing’s high standing among the yBa's and won her the 1997 Turner Prize.

Like Signs, Pin-Ups, a new body of work made specifically for this show, narrowly mines the everyday for signs of absurdity and lapses in self-awareness. Wearing has chosen to focus on aspiring pin-ups and glamour models, putting an ad in a newspaper to that end and then vetting the responses for those who had “enthusiasm” and “real aspirations.” The chosen women and men in turn each got their own homage-cum-wunderkammer, courtesy of both Wearing and fantasy artist Jim Shaw, who painted the airbrushed, lush portraits of the subjects that constitute the frontispiece of each work. These painted panels unhinge to reveal simple glass-covered boxes containing the photos and statements submitted by Wearing’s responders. These have such a different tone from Shaw’s portraits—deflated, raw, sometimes pathetic and sometimes endearing—that the process of looking at one then the other feels constantly unresolved. The portraits are the inflated fluff which these people see as a kind of ideal content. The cabinet constitutes tiny, personal archives of their complex self-reflexive impulses. They speak to fantasy’s collective cultural hold, its timelessness; they tell fraught little stories minimally.

(Images from top to bottom: Gillian Wearing, Rowena, 2008, acrylic on masonite in custom frame; ink on paper, photographs under glass, 31 3/8 x 37 7/8 x 2 inches (79.7 x 96.2 x 5.1cm); Gillian Wearing, Dominik, 2008, acrylic on masonite in custom frame; ink on paper, photographs under glass, 38 7/8 x 25 3/8 x 2 inches (98.7 x 64.5 x 5.1 cm); Gillian Wearing, Laura, 2008, acrylic on masonite in custom frame; ink on paper, photographs under glass, 39 7/8 x 27 x 2 inches