Christine Tamblyn

Mistaken Identities is an interactive CD ROM inspired by the lives and work of 10 famous women: Josephine Baker, Simone de Beauvoir, Catherine the Great, Colette, Marie Curie, Marlene Dietrich, Isadora Duncan, Frida Kahlo, Margaret Mead and Gertrude Stein. These figures were chosen for their emblematic status as female role models. However, the CD ROM examines them as complex figures whose identities are not essential or fixed, but contingent and mutable. Their identities are configured in the negotiated space between self and other, a negotiation that continues in my relation to them as narrator.

Each of these women derived her power from her ability to continually reinvent herself in response to the pressures and contradictions presented by her situation. Each woman also made a substantial contribution to culture and society in fields that were not particularly open to her participation. Mistaken Identities constructs a genealogy around these women, observing the overlaps and parallels between their histories without undermining the specificities of each person's particular accommodation to the dilemma of how to be a woman.

The boundaries between fact, fiction and interpretation are intentionally blurred in the project. TV Movies consists of clips from documentaries and Hollywood movies based on the women's lives. The viewer can channel surf to watch these cultural artifacts that iconize their female subjects as templates to be emulated.

CHRISTINE TAMBLYN - Abbreviated Vita

Christine Tamblyn has been making electronic art and writing cultural criticism since 1974. Her critical articles and reviews have been published in many art magazines and academic journals, including Art News, Afterimage, Leonardo, High Performance, exposure and the College Art Association Journal. Her articles on feminist performance and video have been anthologized in Illuminating Video (Aperture Press), in Yesterday and Tomorrow: California Women's Art (Midmarch Press) in Feminist Criticisms 2 (Harper/Collins) and in Resolutions 2 (University of Minnesota Press).

Tamblyn is an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at University of California, Irvine. She has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Mills College in Oakland, the School of Visual Arts in New York, the University of California at Santa Cruz and San Francisco State University. Her performative lectures have been presented at many professional conferences: the Society for Photographic Education National Conference, the College Art Association National Conference, the National Alliance of Media Art Centers Conference and the American Film Institute National Video Festival. She was the recipient of the John McCarron Art Writing Award from Artspace in San Francisco in 1987 and 1990.