Graft and Ash for a Three Monitor Workstation, 2016

This assemblage of luxurious silk and satin fabrics, a mannequin, and found objects, housed in a vitrine-like light box, resembles a department store window display. Since the 1970s, Colette has integrated commerce, fashion, and fictitious personas into performances and installations that critique the constructed nature of identity and femininity. In 1978, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, she staged a performative “death” and was “reborn” as Justine, the lead singer of Justine and the Victorian Punks and president of Colette is Dead, Co. This sculpture was originally part of Major Works from the Estate (1980), an installation drawn from that performance, tracing Justine’s invented biography through mysterious vignettes the artist called “living environments.” Its format and human scale echo Sondra Perry’s adjacent video-sculpture Graft and Ash for a Three Monitor Workstation (2016), which similarly presents a stand-in for the artist. In Perry’s work, a digital avatar is paired with an inaccessible stationary bicycle to interrogate the exploitation of Black bodies and labor in virtual technologies and underscore the out-of-body experience of virtual spaces.