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66 carrie Mae WeeMS reflections For now 22 June – 3 September Barbican art gallery Working across photography, video, text, and installation, Carrie Mae Weems has been at the forefront of American art since her Kitchen Table Series gained widespread attention in 1990. More than thirty years on, Reflections for Now at the Barbican Gallery in London is the first major UK exhibition of Weems’s work. The exhibition curated by Florence Ostende and Raúl Muñoz de la Vega highlights themes of race, gender, history, and power that Weems has addressed throughout her artistic career. Weems has often used performance as a means of exploring these topics, and the theatre-style curtains that line the walls of the exhibition entrance suitably signal the visitor’s movement into a space of heightened performativity. The exhibition opens on the upper floor with Painting the Town (2021), a series of large-scale colour photographs taken in Weems’s hometown of Portland, Oregon following demonstrations in response to the murder of George Floyd by the police. The photographs capture boarded-up storefronts that have been painted over to cover graffitied messages. The resulting broad brushstrokes and flat picture planes of the boards recalls the Painting the Town #3 (2021) visual language of abstract expressionism. Just as contributions to the abstract expressionist movement by Black artists such as Beauford Delaney and Norman Lewis have been erased from mainstream art historical narratives, so have the graffitied voices of protestors been eradicated by the broad brushstrokes on the boarded-up windows. A single photograph in the room depicts a street corner, its dimensionality serving as a visual reminder that the series is a record of racial violence rather than a purely aesthetic statement. Other quiet meditations on the effects of racial violence are found throughout the exhibition in pieces such as Holocaust Memorial (2013) and It’s Over – A Diorama (2021). Another recent work, Land of Broken Dreams: A Case Study Room (2021) melds the past and present in an installation that loosely recreates a meeting space of the 1960s Black Power movements and pays tribute to its leaders. A portrait of Huey P. Newton hangs against the back wall amidst shelves lined with objects such as commemorative plates, globes, and figurines of Mao Land of Broken Dreams: A Case Study Room (2021), Installation view: Jemima Yong
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exhibitions 67 Kitchen Table Series, installation view: Jemima Yong Untitled (Woman and Daughter with Make Up) from Kitchen Table Series (1990) and a sleek black panther. Visitors are invited to sit and explore archival issues of Time Magazine and View-Masters loaded with photographs by Weems, including her earlier series And 22 Million Very Tired and Very Angry People (1991). The present-day invades the immersive scene through certain objects, such as a series of texts entitled History of Violence with volumes named after recent events, such as The Killing of George Floyd and COVID-19. Certain volumes, like The Sky is Falling, seem to allude to an apocalyptic future. Weems disintegrates temporal boundaries to highlight the persistence of civil rights issues nearly sixty years after the start of the Black Power movement. Weems’s earlier works provide a foundation from which to understand those from more recent years. In Kitchen Table Series (1990), Weems creates a series of photographs of herself at a kitchen table alone and with lovers, friends, and a child. The camera’s position never changes, but the interpersonal dynamics that play out in front of it vary widely. The text, written in the third person, tells the story of a relationship between a man and woman that defies traditional ideals of monogamy and motherhood. Weems appears in her own works as what she calls her ‘muse,’ a sort of performative alter ego, and Kitchen Table Series is her muse’s first appearance. From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995-6) also experiments with the interplay between image and text. For this work, Weems recontextualises daguerreotypes of enslaved men and women commissioned by Harvard scientist Louis Agassiz to support the racist theory of polygenism. She enlarges the photographs and adds red and blue filters, circular mounts, and text overlays. Reading of the texts requires sustained looking at the images over which they are placed, which are difficult to confront. Weems chooses language that is open-ended rather than concrete in its meaning, allowing ample space for interpretation. Her goal in doing so, it would seem, is not to provide answers, but to create the time and space for contemplation. The forty-minute panoramic video The Shape of Things: A Film in Seven Parts (2021) combines found footage with Weems’s own work old and new. One of the film’s seven parts splices together video from the January 6 United States Capitol attack and archival circus footage, candidly equating the two. Another shows a photograph of a young Black man wearing a hoodie repeated many times across the screen; as the images steadily grows larger, the man remains unidentifiable due to the pixelated quality of the photographs. Through this enlargement, he becomes a surrogate for the countless Black men who have been senselessly murdered. Despite the gravity of this work, Weems maintains a persistent optimism. Artistic collaboration recurs throughout the film, and in its final part we see Weems herself joyfully swinging in a heavenly setting. Her refusal to surrender this lightness and hope for a better imagined future is an act of resistance. Whether repurposing archival materials, experimenting with text, or putting on a performance, Weems uses her work to begin conversations rather than provide closed statements. Her works are in constant dialogue with one another and their wider contexts both past and future; as a result, her oeuvre is a continuous exploration of a nexus of themes rather than a compilation of discrete works. These can be seen explicitly in Weems’s frequent repurposing of her own work in new ways, but also more subtly in her ability to universalise geographically and temporally specific events. Although Weems primarily addresses American history, the broader themes that she grapples with are easily identified with by an international audience. — Francesca Butterfield

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67

Kitchen Table Series, installation view: Jemima Yong

Untitled (Woman and Daughter with Make Up) from Kitchen Table Series (1990)

and a sleek black panther. Visitors are invited to sit and explore archival issues of Time Magazine and View-Masters loaded with photographs by Weems, including her earlier series And 22 Million Very Tired and Very Angry People (1991). The present-day invades the immersive scene through certain objects, such as a series of texts entitled History of Violence with volumes named after recent events, such as The Killing of George Floyd and COVID-19. Certain volumes, like The Sky is Falling, seem to allude to an apocalyptic future. Weems disintegrates temporal boundaries to highlight the persistence of civil rights issues nearly sixty years after the start of the Black Power movement. Weems’s earlier works provide a foundation from which to understand those from more recent years. In Kitchen Table Series (1990), Weems creates a series of photographs of herself at a kitchen table alone and with lovers, friends, and a child. The camera’s position never changes, but the interpersonal dynamics that play out in front of it vary widely. The text, written in the third person, tells the story of a relationship between a man and woman that defies traditional ideals of monogamy and motherhood. Weems appears in her own works as what she calls her ‘muse,’ a sort of performative alter ego, and Kitchen Table Series is her muse’s first appearance. From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995-6) also experiments with the interplay between image and text. For this work, Weems recontextualises daguerreotypes of enslaved men and women commissioned by Harvard scientist Louis Agassiz to support the racist theory of polygenism. She enlarges the photographs and adds red and blue filters, circular mounts, and text overlays. Reading of the texts requires sustained looking at the images over which they are placed, which are difficult to confront. Weems chooses language that is open-ended rather than concrete in its meaning, allowing ample space for interpretation. Her goal in doing so, it would seem, is not to provide answers, but to create the time and space for contemplation. The forty-minute panoramic video The Shape of Things: A Film in Seven Parts (2021) combines found footage with Weems’s own work old and new. One of the film’s seven parts splices together video from the January 6 United States Capitol attack and archival circus footage, candidly equating the two. Another shows a photograph of a young Black man wearing a hoodie repeated many times across the screen; as the images steadily grows larger, the man remains unidentifiable due to the pixelated quality of the photographs. Through this enlargement, he becomes a surrogate for the countless Black men who have been senselessly murdered. Despite the gravity of this work, Weems maintains a persistent optimism. Artistic collaboration recurs throughout the film, and in its final part we see Weems herself joyfully swinging in a heavenly setting. Her refusal to surrender this lightness and hope for a better imagined future is an act of resistance. Whether repurposing archival materials, experimenting with text, or putting on a performance, Weems uses her work to begin conversations rather than provide closed statements. Her works are in constant dialogue with one another and their wider contexts both past and future; as a result, her oeuvre is a continuous exploration of a nexus of themes rather than a compilation of discrete works. These can be seen explicitly in Weems’s frequent repurposing of her own work in new ways, but also more subtly in her ability to universalise geographically and temporally specific events. Although Weems primarily addresses American history, the broader themes that she grapples with are easily identified with by an international audience.

— Francesca Butterfield

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