User:Morgan4276

Colette


Colette was born in Tunisia, she grew up in France and eventually moved to the United States. She turned spaces into fantastical dreamscapes and homes for fictional personas. Over the years she’s created and embodied different personas. According to the artist’s website, her faces include Colette, Justine(of Justine and The Victorian Punks ), Mata Hari, Countess Reichenbach, the House of Olympia, and Lumiere. Some notable transformations were in 1978 when she "killed" Colette in a piece called “The Last Stitch” and was reborn as Justine, and when she became Lumiere after 9-11. She often embodied a doll in her work. In an interview with Katie Peyton for Bomb Magazine she explained that the doll was not used as a symbol of female oppression, as so many feminists of the time thought. She used the doll as an expression of, in her words, “the human condition: none of us really know where we come from.” In a time where feminist work usually meant shunning anything “traditionally feminine,” she embraced a whimsical "traditionally feminine" aesthetic. She’s worked with fabric, creating spaces, staged photos, incorporating sleep into art, and changing personas.