Kara Walker

I saw her work at the Guggenheim a while ago, and it has stayed with me. She decorates big spaces with life-size cut-out silhoutted figures that recount the brutal and often repressed history of American race relations. She simplifies the racial struggle into easily readable, caricatured forms that embody scenes of bestiality, castration murder and cannibalism.
But appart from the figures, in her latest work she includes projected backgrounds and colored lights. That way, when viewers walk in front of these projections, their shadows are introduced into the scene denying them the comfortable position of spectator and implicating them in the events.
"I knew that if I was going to make work that had to deal with race issues, they were going to be full of contradictions. Because I always felt that it's really a love affair that we've got going in this country, a love affair with the idea of it [race issues], with the notion of major conflict that needs to be overcome and maybe a fear of what happens when that thing is overcome-- And, of course, these issues also translate into [the] very personal: Who am I beyond this skin I'm in?"

Posted by Eider at September 9, 2003 11:26 PM