Hide Clipping Mask in Character Animator?

I've had several puppets now where the ability to use an invisible clipping mask like in After Effects or Photoshop would have helped sooooo much. Instead it's impossible to use a clipping mask unless the clipping mask is visible. This works great for eyeballs and faces but is useless for anything else, particularly for puppets that have extra moving parts (like robot/mechanical type of thing).

I've tried everything that I could think of as a workaround to trick CA into showing the art while hiding the mask. The closest I could get was using pure black/white masks set to blending modes, but that also sets the artwork to that blending mode as well.

Would really love to see this in future versions of CA!!