Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love. (Whitney Museum of American Art)
Kara Walker, a receiver of the MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant came onto the art scene in 1994 with “Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart.” Like her earliest work, her latest exhibition “My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love” also focuses on the theme of race. Her medium of art is quite interesting – black-paper silhouette cutouts that adorned white walls, other smaller notebook drawings, collages, and film animations starring shadow-puppets. The film animations are the highlights of the exhibition and provide a sort of background for the silhouette pieces. One of the animations shows the origins of slaves. Cast out at sea after being capture and thrown overboard during a storm, slaves are swallowed by a “giant mouth” and then spewed out into cotton fields to face abuses. What is fascinating is Walker’s range of depiction of stereotyped images of black Southern history. There are graphic depictions of rapes and lynchings. Then there are caricatures of sorts where certain features are emphasized such as fat lips, oversize genitals, and other exaggerations. Her art compels you to come to conclusions of race in the past and Southern America. Whatever these conclusions may be, Kara Walker’s exhibition definitely makes you think.
October 19th, 2007 at 12:06 am
Very interesting. I can imagine the artist’s use of color here to make a point about race.