Cindy Sherman at the Montclair Art Museum

For a body of work that has loomed so large since the 1980s, Cindy Sherman's performative self-portraits possess a surprisingly mundane origin. In 1975, Sherman was an undergraduate at Buffalo State College. Teacher Barbara Jo Revelle introduced her to conceptual photography, and then-boyfriend Robert Longo encouraged her to record her process of dolling up for parties. Et voila: the first examples of her carefully staged photographs that effortlessly parody gender cliches. Sherman's range has grown over time, but she has never reset her initial bearing.

This insight was persuasively argued in a small traveling show of Sherman's early work. "The Unseen Cindy Sherman: Early Transformations (1975-1976)," organized by Gall Stavitsky, presented 11 works culled mostly from family collections. Several of these had never been publicly displayed. On view in a vitrine, for example, was a 5-inch-square photo album that Sherman gave to her niece Barbara Foster as a Christmas gift in 1976. As Sherman hand-wrote on one of the pages, it showed "what I've surrounded myself with in the last couple of years." Visible examples included a pair of nostalgic family snapshots and a fuchsia feather sticking out from the album's black pages.

Of greater art-historical importance were several groups of untitled, hand-colored, black-and-white photos from 1975 that capture Sherman's self-transformations, step by step. In one work arranged in three registers, 23 small photos of the artist in front of a plain backdrop plot Sherman's metamorphosis from dour everywoman to glamorous, heavily made-up party girl. The painstaking manipulation of her own face and hair underscores the artifice of female identity.

More whimsical works on view included two multi-figure collages, The Fairies and Untitled (Mini), both 1976. Sherman shot entire rolls of film showing herself in costume, posing and mugging goofily; in the first work she wears a winged tunic, and in the second, a mini-dress along with chunky high heels. After developing the rolls, she cut out the images like paper dolls, and pasted onto paper each set of 37 self-portraits, creating undulating chorus lines of demented Ziegfeld girls.

Sherman first explored narrative in several series of photo-collage storyboards, again using cutouts. One scene from the "Murder Mystery Series" (1976) consists of an actress and a director standing in a stage door, surrounded by three paparazzi. Sherman plays all the characters. Several years later, these handmade melodramas gave way to the seamless perfection of her breakthrough "Untitled Film Stills."

The work in this show squares well with the feminism of Eleanor Antin's Carving (1972) and Suzy Lake's Miss Chatelaine (1973), both of which paired conceptual photography and performance to investigate the social construction of women in America. What distinguishes Sherman's early pieces is her sense of unabashed play that trumps any overt political agenda. [The exhibition traveled to the Burchfield-Penney Art Center at Buffalo State College, Oct. 21,2004-Jan. 9, 2005.]

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