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GIRL WITH MANY SELVES
AKA NIKKI S. LEE
BY NIKKI S. LEE
60 MINUTES, 2006
Like another case of art imitating life imitating popular stereotypes, a trope that defines much of Nikki S. Lee's work thus far, this fashionably mutating artist was among the crowd, but incognito, for the regional premiere of her first film, AKA Nikki S. Lee. Her black shag and sober clothing marked her as an understudied but hip grad student from the nearby university, so when she rose from the row behind us, much of the audience laughed. Once more, Lee confirmed that context and costume determine not only how we read an image, but also how we read real life.
In her introduction, Lee appropriately acknowledged that "what's a reality and what's not a reality" is no longer a distinction worth discerning. As her cinematic foray into the elusive boundaries between fashion's fictions and fact further proposes, we are always metamorphosing, dressing, and performing with the gaze or expectations of another in mind, and in turn, make presumptions on the same. Her sardonic detachment from herself as a subject, perhaps unexpected given her body's central role in her work, was manifest when the slide projector would not advance. After about four minutes, Lee looked up at the maroon-toned work by Mark Rothko on the...