The visual tropes of Kara Walker's work - race, sex, the gothic, the grotesque, violence, violation, abjection, obscenity, desire, death, excrement, and slavery - collide and crash violently and constantly with the racial and sexual registers of American history and culture. Her representations of transgression and excess - those visual discursive eruptions that leak from the confines of the image - possess a disturbing and destabilizing power.
Thesis
Pertaining to previous materials reviewed throughout this course, installation art is a powerful form of creative expression by creating ambient and immersive spaces that allow viewers to emotionally and mentally engage with the work. Using to phrase “ambient”, perfectly describes the experience one shall have when looking at such revealing work. Installations allow fluidity of the mind that voyageurs within the space tend to follow suit and start to be engulfed in it. Installations tell a story without words.
My Favorite Pieces
Walker first rose to fame in an exhibition at The Drawing Center in New York of her work Gone: An Historical Romance of Civil War as it Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of Young Negress and Her Heart.
In 2019 Walker unveiled Fons Americanus as part of the Hyundai Commission for the Tate Modern in London. The 13 m tall fountain critically responded to the Victoria Memorial fountain in front of Buckingham Palace, connecting the earlier version and the history it represented to Great Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade.
Links to the videos that I used in the presentation:
