SEE http://www.claremontmuseum.org/exhibit1.html FOR UPCOMING EXHIBITION!!
The ‘Reconsidered Archive of Michelle du Bois’, a problematized documentary project, explores
the larger-than-life persona and culturally-weighted sexuality found in the visual fragments and
wondrous archive of Michelle du Bois. An American woman who turned tricks while traveling through
post-WWII Pacific Rim cities during the 70s and 80s, she took, collected and kept hundreds of tourist
photographs, family snapshots, and pornographic images of herself. Her problematic and slippery
identity, her exotic everyday, culturally, sexually and otherwise, becomes manifest through her personal
experience, proposing an identity that rises from within rather than any social construct imposed upon
her from the outside. Playing with the imaginary duBois engages in, perpetuates and represents - her
fantasy of Asia, the fantasies she poses for, the artist's fantasy of her and her fantasy of the artist,
along with the fantasy of the archive, the false promise of travel and an obsession with transience
and the identities it provokes- the work manifests as reconfigured clusters of images and, ultimately, a book.
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