The Bald and the Beautiful, Performance, July 14, 2007 Artist21 series, Brewery Artist Lofts, Los Angeles
In a media-saturated world where headlines about Portia de Rossi cutting her signature locks and Charlize Theron shaving her head for a film role focus on appearance rather than talent, I decided to make my own statement about how we define worth and beauty. This performance emerged from frustration with a society that reduces accomplished women to their physical attributes.
Against a backdrop of my virtual avatar Gracie Kendal projected in an infinite checkerboard landscape, I had my head shaved live in front of an audience. The juxtaposition was deliberate—my pixelated, perfected digital self watched as I stripped away one of the most gendered markers of conventional femininity from my physical body.
This act was both destruction and liberation. Each strand that fell represented shedding societal expectations, media-imposed standards, and the exhausting performance of conventional beauty. The checkerboard pattern behind me—borrowed from my virtual world—suggested the game-like nature of beauty standards, where we're all pawns moving according to rules we didn't write.
The performance was part of my ongoing Gracie Kendal Project, which explores the psychological co-existence with my virtual persona through installation, photography, video, and live action. In Second Life, Gracie could have perfect hair that never needed cutting, styling, or worrying about. But here, in physical space, I was choosing to reject the very thing that digital worlds promise—effortless, permanent beauty.
I said I wouldn't grow my hair back until society changed. It was the most freeing thing I had ever done—a radical act of refusal in a world that tells women their value lies in their ability to conform to visual standards. Through documentation and performance, I construct narratives of self that help deconstruct ideas of normalcy and authenticity, insisting that we are not defined by our physical attributes.
This performance represents the moment when virtual exploration became physical transformation, where the safety of digital experimentation gave way to irreversible real-world action.
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