Eleanor Antin’s “The Adventures of a Nurse,” from 1976.
"Eleanor Antin likes to quote Walt Whitman. “I contain multitudes,” she says more than once in an interview in the catalog for “Multiple Occupancy: Eleanor Antin’s Selves,” a sometimes piercing, often campy exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art.
The show, organized by Columbia University’s Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery and curated by Emily Liebert, examines several characters the conceptual artist created and portrayed between 1972 and 1991, in video, film, photography, and performance. The impetus to invent characters came in part from her post-modern, feminist awareness of how our identities bind us. “I consider the usual aids to self-definition - sex, age, talent, time, and space - as tyrannical limitations upon my freedom of choice,” she wrote in 1974."
Multiple Occupancy: Eleanor Antin’s Selves
March 19 - July 6, 2014
Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston
http://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/onview/