Word: visualizers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts...
...racism in America. Like the chromatic form of the piece--black paper on white walls--the exhibit deals with race only in 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...
...divide between conscious and unconscious more so than the divide between real and metaphor. Walker's images allude to Freud's analysis of dreams. The series of fantastical silhouettes--a tree split in half, a two-headed woman, oddly-shaped flowers, a man with talons--create a visual world that vacillates between dream and nightmare. The dream that Walker unfolds here is not just any dream, but the dream of the collective American psyche, filled with all the pain, desire, cruelty, love, hate and shame of American history...
...effective, any stereotype (whether visual or verbal) must be highly-legible, unambiguous, and easily consumable. Walker's figures are not. Despite the incredible precision of their finely-cut outlines, it's impossible to really know what's going on inside their black, opaque fields. She brilliantly exploits the graphic irony and tension of her medium which seems to provide so much information and yet so little...
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...