The Gracie Kendal Project
The Gracie Kendal Project began in 2006 when I logged into Second Life and created an avatar — tall, thin, blonde, confident — everything I thought I wasn’t. I built her to help me build myself. She became my laboratory, my alter ego, the braver voice on my shoulder — my id and ego on a bicycle in the desert, waiting for me to catch up. Over nearly a decade inside Second Life, Gracie and I built an entire life together — galleries, exhibitions, three artist residencies through the Linden Endowment for the Arts, over 2,000 avatars photographed, immersive installations, performances, friendships, heartbreaks. A house on an island. Real money earned from virtual artwork. A whole civilization built inside a screen.
In November 2009 my graduate professor asked me a question that stopped everything: “Why does Gracie look like she does? Why isn’t she like you?” That question launched 159 days of daily side-by-side photographs — me and my avatar, real and virtual, figuring out who we were together. What started as comparison became conversation. The project became my MA thesis at Cal State Northridge: an exploration of masks, identity, and what you discover about yourself when you inhabit someone entirely different. What I discovered surprised me. The confidence I practiced as Gracie started coming home with me. She was never really about escaping myself. She was about finding myself.
I wasn’t working in a vacuum. Women artists had been here before — asking the same questions about identity, masks, and who gets to inhabit which body. Lynn Hershman Leeson created Roberta Breitmore in 1973, a fully realized alternate identity with her own life, her own therapy appointments, her own history — and later brought that work into Second Life itself as Life Squared. Cindy Sherman spent decades photographing herself as every female stereotype the culture invented, asking whether the mask was hiding something or revealing it. Bibbe Hansen performed her father’s Fluxus works inside Second Life as her avatar Bibbe Oh — the lineage of Happenings and the Factory moving directly into virtual worlds. And Laura Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze — the idea that visual culture positions women as objects constructed for someone else’s viewing pleasure — runs underneath all of it.
Gracie was my answer to that. But she was also my test subject. I wanted to know if the stereotypes were true — if a thinner, blonder, more conventionally beautiful woman actually got more attention, more respect, more room in the world. Stanford University was studying exactly this through what they called the Proteus Effect — research showing that people who inhabited idealized avatars carried that confidence back into their physical lives. I became living proof. Gracie inspired me and changed me in real life. And she confirmed what I suspected — that the world does indeed treat certain bodies differently. That visibility is not neutral. That who gets seen, and how, is never an accident.
Twenty years later I’m bringing Gracie back. Not as nostalgia — as practice. As a tool for looking inward. Kurt Vonnegut wrote that we are who we pretend to be, so we must be careful about who we pretend to be. Gracie was who I pretended to be — and she taught me who I actually was. Thoreau wrote to go confidently in the direction of your dreams, to live the life you have imagined. Gracie was the life I imagined before I knew how to live it myself. Now I’m using her again — to ask the same questions I’ve always been asking, in a world that is still, relentlessly, trying to make me somebody else.
The Gracie Kendal Project — new work and archive — will be on view at the Brand Library in Glendale this September as part of Artifacts from an Unborn Empire, a group exhibition about what civilizations leave behind and who gets to tell the story. The archive — books, screenshots, the 159-day comic grid, documentation of performances and exhibitions — is memory made physical. Evidence that a life fully lived in a virtual world still leaves artifacts. Still deserves to be in the record.
The project sits at the intersection of everything that drives my practice: identity and self-perception, who gets to be seen and on whose terms, what we document and why, and what it means to look inward in a world that keeps pointing outward. Gracie is still out there on her bicycle. And I’m still figuring out who I am alongside her.