Janine Antoni continues to bother her parents well into adulthood.

Usually, when people think of making a modern sculpture, they go: “Gee whiz, I think I’ll ship-shape this slab of steel into something real spiffy.” Janine Antoni, on the other hand, probably thought something along the lines of: “Hey, Mom, Dad, you busy?”

Janine Antoni, a multi-media mastermind, is known for her works exploring identity, usually through her own body. She’s made a painting with her hair and gnawed at chocolate and lard blocks with her teeth. Okay, maybe that second part isn’t so unheard of (Friday nights are rough, ok), but Antoni knows how to use her body and let’s that show.

In Mom and Dad (1996), though, Antoni uses her parents as sculptural material, using prosthetics and stage makeup to transform her mother and father into each other. True, Antoni could have used herself, a la Cindy Sherman. She could have gone on Craigslist and asked strangers to be her models (strictly platonic! payment in chocolate or lard). But the fact that she knows her parents so well makes the effort to change one into the other far more challenging.  Probably even more challenging than learning to tightrope, a feat that Antoni calls “rope-meditation” but I like to call “ice-pack application.”

Why the difficulty?

Because everyone has pretty solid ideas when it comes to what makes mom Mom^TM and what makes dad Dad^TM. Mom could mean the End To All Lice, and Dad the chauffeur with the music taste of a 12th century scholar. Mom could mean the artful folding of laundry, and Dad the metamorphosis of socks into surprisingly firm baseballs.

Whatever people’s associations, Antoni tries to dispel them by suggesting that Mom could be Dad and vice versa. If you look more closely at the portraits, though, the parents don’t seem like they’ve fully morphed into one another. Sure, Dad’s eyebrow game is Covergirl strong, but he looks like a hybrid of Mom and Dad, rather than just Mom. Antoni calls Mom and Dad a “self-portrait,” because by arriving at this hybrid person, she’s basically created herself, a smoothie of two people’s DNA and cells, and crazy ideas. She makes possible the idea of someone who, being a smoothie, can be anyone he/she/they wants to be. Identity is more fluid than steel, and only people—and a bunch of prosthetics—can convey its many dimensions.

Unless you want to be a piece of steel. Then you do you, man. Serra la vie!