Word: haire
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...frankly, after the obligatory minor spasms of unreasoning, abject fear had rippled from hair follicles to bowel, it seemed to me that maybe the end of civilization as we know it isn't such a bad idea. After all, in our long, tedious march of regress have we earthlings really accomplished much besides spewing garbage, ammunition and the Jerry Springer Show into the environment? Wouldn't it set a nice example if we could just for once accept the inevitable and issue a press release reading, "Hey, we gave it our best shot, but we really weren...
...black and white. This form alone, in its insistence on turning negative space into positive space, implies the underlying concept of dialectical racial identities. Walker establishes a visual language that bluntly indicates the race of each silhouetted figure. White figures are marked by a few pointed wisps of hair, a straight nose, and thin lips. Silhouettes of black figures are cut with rounded bumps for hair, or twisted plaits, with rounded noses, and large, often open-hanging lips. The figures look like neither real people nor caricatures, but like characters in some Southern plantation novel that takes itself quite seriously...
...another wall, a two-headed woman leaps through the air, with the head and neck of a white woman attached to the crown of her nappy-haired head. The delicate position of her arms and the grace of her ballet-like leap imply that she, like the waltzing couple, finds pride in her appearance. Perhaps, she is unaware of her second head. More likely, considering her posture, she is proud to have garnished a European head, and is unaware of her deformity. Even more disconcerting, perhaps she acknowledges her deformity, and considers it a small price...
...adrenaline fang bites the rear of his neck." Coupland extends his metaphor of human infringement on nature with the words he uses to describe the post-apocalyptic world: "The darkening sky is becoming a warm, dead Xerox and the winds blow forcefully as though aimed from a hair blower," and "Below them, the fire on the sloping neighborhoods burns like a million Bic lighters held up in the dark at some vast, cosmic Fleetwood Mac concert." Yet often his quirky comparisons go one step too far and cross over the line between the clever and the ridiculous. After Karen falls...
Ultimately, the figures and scenarios in Walker's mysterious, melancholy art don't provide the instant recognition that stereotypes require. Although she may toy with stereotypical tropes like hair texture as a signifier of race, close attention to visual detail distinguishes her subversive and exploratory project from an uncritical parroting of racial cliches...