Kara Walker

As shown in the video, Kara Walker is a silhouette artist and makes use of this medium to explore the complexities of her own life, though “something else, something that is more genteel.” To me, throughout the video, two things that stuck out were how Walker explores the notion of time in her works by using historical information and imagery to convey messages in the present, as well as the emphasis that she places on the turbulence that underlies her work and how this contrasts with the associated visuals. 

Walker notes that she grew up in an environment where Black children were targeted, and how this led to her making the observation that “what Black means in America is loaded with psychological perversions.” This was an extremely powerful statement that stood out to me, as it very succinctly encapsulates the collective history of Black people in America and the trauma that they have endured, as well as reflects her own personal history and experiences. Therefore to me, this statement really captured my attention as it quite effectively demonstrates the overlap between historical and personal narratives that she is attempting to convey in her work. In this way, time is overtly identified as an element of her silhouette pieces as she highlights the fact that the history she references, and the lessons to be learnt from it are still applicable today – in essence, she is demonstrating that nothing has changed, and is provoking her audience to confront the implications of this. Additionally, another moment reflecting this idea that stood out to me was when there was a group of children sitting in the middle of a circular room with Walker’s art covering its singular curved wall and their teacher asked them “does this story have a beginning or an end?” and they nod their heads side to side saying “no.” To me, this further supported the idea that Walker intentionally wants people to recognize time as a central character in her works. Furthermore, she shares that her pieces have to do with the erosion of power and attempts to steal power away from others which crafts “the illusion is that most of her work is simply about past events, a point in history and nothing else.” She notes that this is an aspect of her work that she likes to maintain – a ruse that allows her to navigate her own life by distancing herself and creating a parallel through the imagery that employs. This notion itself implies that she finds parallels between her modern experience and that of history, again centralizing the aspect of time and the lack of change that it has brought. Consequently, Walker notes that her creative practice is about “projecting fictions onto facts” to tell stories of Black people.

Another aspect of Walker’s art that I found highly intriguing is the obsession she seems to have with avoiding direct confrontation with the ideas she wants to convey. As described above, her work and the historical subject matter she employs is already a proxy through which she articulates her own life experiences, however she goes on to state that the medium of silhouette itself “lends itself to avoidance of the subject [and] not being able to look at it directly.” I find this to be very interesting, as I believe it is quite rare to discover an artist who outright acknowledges that they do not want to be confronted with the subject of their own artworks. I think this choice to not address the themes of her work upfront and instead leave it to the audience to contemplate what lies beneath the surface of her silhouettes is quite powerful as it really “implicates them in some way,” as Walker mentioned in the video. It makes the audience a participative entity in the work, that is forced to come to terms with what they are witnessing before them. Furthermore, Walker also has a deep interest in “grotesque and engrossing” imagery. She states that “a lot of what [she] was wanting to do in [her] work and what [she] ha[s] been doing has been about the unexpected…that unexpected situation of wanting to be the heroine and yet wanting to kill the heroine at the same time.” While I don’t fully comprehend this statement in context of her works and the characters she portrays, I think it definitely is an indication of the feeling she would like to evoke through her art – the undertones of tension and malice that are resultant of a long history of oppression. She herself acknowledges that her art has a certain sense of “push and pull” and “underlying turbulence.” Moreover, she also references the fact that she always had an “interest in the melodramatic” and “outrageous images,” showing that she wants to use her art to draw out a reaction from her audience – she is constructing her works to evoke reflection from those that view them. Finally, she underlines the idea that she likes to “make a painting [her] stage and think of figures as characters” on it. This theatricality and drama in her work is also an effective tool through which Walker images her audience and “implicates” them in her work in some way.

Overall, I think Walker is quite an intriguing artist as she makes use of silhouette – a medium that I hadn’t seen used by a practicing artist before – to convey powerful stories that not only centralise and place emphasis on the notion of time, but also are intended to involve the audience and engage them in the narrative portrayed at a very conscious level.

Provided References:
Kara Walker

Work from:
10th Nov 2020 – Daily Vitamins Assignment
Time with Professor Mike Rader