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Carrie Mae Weems, When and Where I Enter -- Mussolini's Rome. from the 2006 Roaming series, Digital chromogenic print, 73 x 61 inches. Image via rhoffmangallery.com.
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Slow Fade to Black
October 26 – December 7, 2013
190 North Peoria Street
Chicago, IL
From the Rhona Hoffman Gallery web site:
For over thirty years, Carrie Mae Weems
has been sharing her distinct voice through powerful and provocative
photographs and video works that directly confront racial and social
stereotypes. Weems consistently asks her audience to reconsider historical record,
generating a dynamic visual conversation between past and present. In a moment
of international celebration with her museum retrospective Three Decades of Photography and Video and receipt of a 2013
MacArthur Foundation ‘Genius’ Award - Rhona Hoffman Gallery is pleased to
present her fourth solo show with the gallery, Slow Fade to Black.
Diverse
in its selection of works, the exhibition highlights the depth of Weems’
oeuvre. In the 1995-96 series From Here I
Saw What Happened and I Cried, she appropriated historic photographs
depicting African-Americans in a racist manner and etched text overtop the
image to give voice to the otherwise voiceless subjects. The 2010-11 series
that lends the exhibition its title, Slow
Fade to Black, focuses on African-American female performers from Josephine
Baker to Marian Anderson. Though the images are masked by lack of focus or
colored tints, Weems’ photographs bring to light figures on the brink of
disappearance from our cultural memory.
Storytelling
and performance play an essential role for Weems, who studied folklore as a
graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. In Constructing
History, subjects reenact historical moments from the Civil Rights Movement;
the inclusion of lighting tracks, pedestals, cameras, and props in this series
calls attention to the media’s ability to control collective memory. In the
video installation Lincoln, Lonnie, and
Me, installed in the second floor gallery, Weems turned the camera on
herself. Brought to life through the “Pepper’s ghost” illusion technique,
characters in this 18-minute theatrical video projection weave a complex story,
conflating the past with the present and evidencing the fact that history is
perpetually being re-written.
Carrie
Mae Weems was born in Portland, Oregon in 1953. She earned a BFA from the
California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, and an MFA from the University of
California, San Diego, continuing her studies in the Graudate Program in
Folklore at the University of California, Berkeley. Awards include the
MacArthur Fellowship (2013), Lifetime Achievement Award from the Congressional
Black Caucus Foundation (2013), Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2007), Skowhegan
Medal for Photography (2007), Rome Prize Fellowship (2006), the Pollack-Krasner
Foundation Grant in Photography (2002), and others. Organized by the Frist
Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville and accompanied by an illustrated
catalogue, a long-overdue retrospective, Carrie
Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video, is currently on view at
the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, and will travel to the
Guggenheim Museum, New York, in January 2014. Weems’ work has appeared in major
exhibitions at Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Art
Institute of Chicago, Illinois (2011); Savannah College of Art and Design,
Georgia (2008); W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American
Research, Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts (2007); and Whitney Museum
of American Art, New York (1998), among others. Carrie Mae Weems lives and
works in Syracuse, New York.
