lilleskat: June 2011

Still from video installation "…calling to me from the angry surface of some grey and threatening sea, I was transported", Kara Walker

Kara Walker is a prolific, contemporary, American artist who creates work "depicting historical narratives haunted by sexuality, violence, and subjugation but made using the genteel 18th-century art of cut-paper silhouettes. Set in the American South before the Civil War, Walker’s compositions play off stereotypes to portray, often grotesquely, life on the plantation, where masters and mistresses and slave men, women, and children enact a subverted version of the past in an attempt to reconfigure their status and representation"

Does it remind you of Gone with the wind? Not only do I find that period of time fascinating but I find myself enchanted by the work of Kara Walker because of the seemingly innocent and playful nature of the images that draw you in. On closer inspection you realise the sinister and haunting undertones of the work. Some of Walker's work remind's me of early Disney cartoons (Darkytown Rebellion and Mistress demanded swift and dramatic empathetic reaction which we obliged her) so easy to look at and they feel fun. How wrong we are.

Excavated from the Black Heart of a Negress, 2002, Kara Walker

"Over the years the Kara Walker has used drawing, painting, colored-light projections, writing, shadow puppetry, and, most recently, film animation to narrate her tales of romance, sadism, oppression, and liberation. Walker’s scenarios thwart conventional readings of a cohesive national history and expose the collective, and ongoing, psychological injury caused by the tragic legacy of slavery. Her work leads viewers through an aesthetic experience that evokes a critical understanding of the past and proposes an examination of contemporary racial and gender stereotypes"