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For her latest solo show, Becoming Colette, multimedia artist Colette Copeland has switched alter egos, assuming the identity of French author Colette. As a teen, Copeland naturally gravitated toward the novels of the famous French author who used her first name as a pen name. Over the years, she found out as much as she could about Colette.
"I knew I wanted to go to France and visit the places she wrote about in her books," says Copeland. "Also where she lived, where she wrote. I knew I wanted to film there." She went on a performative journey and this work is Copeland imagining what it would be like to be Colette, presented from a first-person perspective.
The author is a good fit for an artist who likes to break down rules of social norms and gender. "In her time she was a human rights activist," says Copeland. "In her novels she pointed out the gender inequities."
There are five videos on small screens inside Colette's novels. The videos do not illustrate the text — the text is completely separate — but there may be some conceptual overlay. "I liked the idea that people might read an excerpt and then the visual takes them into another space," says Copeland. Information that is viewed is processed completely differently by our brain than read information. Images embedded in texts seem to play with the senses.
None of the videos produce sound. The exhibit has its own soundtrack, a work composed and performed by cellist Dallin B. Peacock fused with a 1960 recording of Colette reading excerpts from a few of her novels. The ambient soundtrack does not contextualize any of the work, leaving the imagination to focus on the interface between the textual and visual.
There is a video of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, the village in North-Central France where Colette was born in 1873. Colette grew up surrounded by the forest but most of the forest is gone now. A museum dedicated to her life and work is located in her childhood home. Inside the museum, Colette's furniture and personal artifacts have been collected and arranged to suggest how she actually lived.
The museum seemed very realistic in some ways and obviously fake in others. In the living room section of the museum, for example, there are personal artifacts, but none of Colette's books. On the wall there is a painted bookcase full of her books. Copeland was stunned by how clearly artificial it was.
Binary relationships are a motif of the exhibit. "There were a lot of assumptions and perceptions about who Colette was and the themes in her work," she says. "There was this public persona and then the private persona. Many times there was this conflict between what was real and what was a rumor or perception."
Another video captures Colette's glass collection. The author loved to collect glass and this video seems to reflect all the unexpected layers of her complicated personality. Colette was an esteemed writer who cultivated her celebrity persona — she even had her own perfume line. But she was also known for not being a particularly good parent; she had quite a few husbands, in addition to affairs with a famous baroness and her own stepson.
Two other videos were shot in Paris, where Colette lived on two occasions, both at Palais Royal. One video shows the gardens, including a place where the author used to sit and write. In contrast to wild nature, the spot was confined, landscaped and manicured. The other video was shot in Le Grand VéFour. Once a café frequented by French cultural heavyweights, it is now a five-star restaurant.
Simple narrative techniques are used for these five-inch videos. A montage is used to show how the past and present converge; video is layered to suggest a break in time or a memory from a different time period. Colette appears in ghost-like form, embodying space. Panning shots suggest movement, extending vision in one direction while imagery dissolves in another.
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A collection of Colette's books illustrates how her work has been packaged as both high art and fluff. Her books have looked like classic literature, cheap romance novels, feminist fiction and pulp fiction. This interplay of high and low culture was a starting point for the show.
Copeland made linocuts from the romance novel covers using the solarplate printmaking process. Invented in the 1970s, this photographic method definitely isn't digital. A negative image was produced through tedious labor that required her to touch the images rather than just scan them. These gritty negative works are in contrast to the sappy book covers used to create them. This is a play on the theme of high and low culture.
"I collect dead things," says Copeland. Colette loved nature and often described it in her writing. Copeland created an embossed calligraph, a collage with specimens including a moth, lizards, branches and other bugs pressed in white paper. This is a subtle play on the theme of perception versus reality. From a distance it may look minimalist, but up close you can see all the shapes of the bodies inside.
Becoming Colette opens at 6 p.m. Saturday at The Reading Room (3715 Parry Ave.) and runs through February 20.


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Discover how food memories are made as you taste your way through the kitchens of Magic Kingdom park*. Remember the first time you tried a Dole Whip? Or maybe you eat a turkey leg every time you come to the park? Food is an essential part of the Walt Disney World vacation experience.
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Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories (Game Boy Advance)
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SummaryPushed The Technical Limits Of The GBA.
The GoodI enjoyed the original PS2 "Kingdom Hearts" game immensely. It remains a noteworthy title, and shows how easily Square can blend their worlds with others (the previous attempt being Super Mario RPG). That said, this game ties the first and second game together in a gorgeous package.
From the first second of the game beginning, players are treated to a several minute full FMV of Sora, Donald, and Goofy's new adventure. The effect is so jarringly unlike anything seen on Game Boy that you have to pause for a moment to fully take it in. Even when the normal gameplay starts, the effects are no less impressive. The characters have a SNES Square style to them, are well animated, and instantly recognizable. The locales? Beautifully animated. It's easily one of the most gorgeous GBA game out.
Sound-wise, it has voice clips from the actors and actresses from the first game and movies. Brief, but recognizable and effective. And the music is extremely well done, with the tunes from the PS2 game. Again, it makes for a pleasant and surprising audio experience.
Story? There are some changes, mostly with the card battle system and more notable how Sora and Co. can now walk in Atlantica. But changes are not ignored, and explanations are placed within context of the story, so players can buy into it. Even with the major absence of most voices, the text is well written, and emotionally resonant. Typical Square. You feel for these characters. Smart dialogue, and everything sounds in place.
The card battle system is the most radical change, and though I do miss the hack/slash style of the first game, the battle system still makes sure action is the emphasis. Different, but once you get into how it's done, it becomes second nature.
The BadGiven the impressiveness of the title, there's not much to complain about. However, there are a few things:
The card system has one flaw: In long battles, once the cards are gone, they're gone until the end of the battle. So if you run out of the most necessary cards, you're out of luck. This happened during my fight with Oogie Boogie, and was painful.
Battles in general are attack or avoid, but some creatures will decimate you if not careful. Captain Hook went off with his bomb attacks, and corned me to the point where I could do little more than watch helplessly as my entire life bar was drained away. That's frustrating. Especially when you have to cycle through all of the pre-fight dialogue again.
The last notable thing is that as good as the worlds are in KH:COM, I wish there had been some new worlds instead of the same worlds from the first game. Tarzan was strangely missing from the mix this time. Still, Square adds some new spins to keep at least the ideas fresh.
The Bottom LineIt's an extremely recommended game for GBA, well into the "must-own" category. An extremely well-crafted action/adventure/RPG that pushes the technical limits of the system like no other. The CG opening is stunning, and it's not the only movie in the game.
This is a title that shows off what can be done with the system if placed in the right hands. A good looking and sounding game that balances it all out with solid gameplay and an intelligent, thought-provoking story.
Easily one of the best GBA games of 2004, if not THE best. Highly recommended.


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Overcoming Odds, Author's Success & Daughter's Talents Forged 'Self Worth'
Min Cherishes America's Greatness
HOUSTON, June 23, 2013 — Anchee Min has lived in this country for nearly three decades, having arrived from China penniless and knowing no English. "I was born in China, but I discovered myself in America," she told an Asia Society Texas Center audience. Still, one thing will always distinguish her from her adopted countrymen. Unlike for most Americans, she said, her past is never past.
Transmuting that past into literature has made Min arguably the most popular Chinese-American novelist in the United States. She is the author of six novels, including The Last Empress and Becoming Madame Mao, and Red Azalea, a memoir of her girlhood during the Cultural Revolution. Her recently released The Cooked Seed: A Memoir chronicles her life in this country, including her two marriages, motherhood, and her struggles to be a writer.
To discuss The Cooked Seed Min was joined onstage by a key figure in the memoir, Lauryann Jiang, her multitalented daughter, a Stanford University junior whose upbringing by the strong-willed Min included ballet lessons, competitive pole vaulting, and learning how to hang drywall. Brief video vignettes during Min's talk also illustrated her daughter's natural gifts, including an original composition the self-taught pianist wrote for her mother.
Min, who was plucked from an agricultural labor camp in 1976 to be trained as an actress at the Shanghai Film Studio, brought a flair for performance to her book talk, combining readings from The Cooked Seed with short film clips, several focusing on the life lessons she wanted to bequeath to Jiang.
Two themes wound through the presentation. One was the second-class status of women in Chinese culture and Min's fight to achieve a sense of self-worth. In a film clip provocatively titled "Why I Didn't Want a Daughter" she lamented the greater value placed on boy babies over girl babies in China. Jiang commented, "She cried because she wanted to protect me from the struggles she saw ahead of me."
Min's determination to prepare her daughter for a sometimes harsh, unfair world could make for unorthodox parenting strategies, including a birthday outing not to Disneyland but to Home Depot so the girl could learn to use a table saw. Jiang took the microphone to emphasize that she had a happy childhood and "knew my mother really cared about me."
Min also talked about her goals as a writer, chief of which is to better explain China to Americans.
"The best way I can repay America is to help Americans understand China as I see it," she said. The two countries are destined to be both partners and rivals in coming decades, and "the best way to know where China is going is to learn where China is coming from."
In her fiction, which often turns on historical figures such as "last empress" Tsu Hsi, Madame Mao Zedong, and novelist Pearl Buck, she tries to combine solid history with entertaining, engaging storytelling, she said. Early in her career she studied Gone With the Wind, among other popular novels, to get a sense of what American readers liked.
Her hope is that her China-informed perspectives can enlarge and enrich the storehouse of American writing.
Reported by Fritz Lanham