Friday, October 13, 2017

Kara Walker at Sikkema Jenkins


(link)

[A press release to melt steel girds.]

The silhouettes lacking color were assigned it through expectations of their inhabited shape: Colorless and projected with a hue-as-designation through our own cultural assumptions, achromic yet colored, the metaphors manifold and rife. Now Walker paints in the colors like an assignation, assigning of her own hand what had been ours to.  What is noticeable is the umber never touches its outline, it's held within or smeared on top. The pale fleshes melt, meld with their surroundings, perhaps simply because paleness is considered to be standard, the backdrop, blend into it.