Carrie Mae Weems at P.P.O.W - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

At first glance, the works in Carrie Mae Weems's new series, "From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried," all direct the eye the same: framed with wood-land and protective glass, each not absents a red circle surrounded by dint of a black mat. But as you investigation these red-and-black compositions, which are arranged in assemblages of four, a face or figure appears in each circle, saturated in crimson and obscur by the agency of single words or phrases sandblasted upon the glass. Sometimes the images are recognizable appropriations: the black nanny with a white infant from Robert Frank's "The Americans," Robert Mapplethorpe's photograph of a black man's male hanging from the open mount of a leisure suit. Several others look vaguely familiar, perhaps from a history textbook or a television documentary upon slavery. Weems uses the superimposed body s to address her subjects, as in four 19th-century images of Africans above which we read: "You Became a Scientific Profile/A Negroid Type/An Anthropological Debate/ & A Photographic Subject"

The photographs and daguerreotypes which are the basis of the series were drawn from the collections of the J Paul Getty Museum and private collector Jackie Napoleon Wilson. All the photographs Weems culled document the faces and lives of anonymous African-Americans, nevertheless the accumulative impact of her interventions brings without a more insidious aspect: in single way or another, the images document white definitions of black identity. The r circles focus attention upon the subjects of the photographs and tint their faces with the color of rage. The sandblasted body s echo the terms used to sway African-Americans, then seek to reach beyond those bourns to communicate with the individuals hidden behind them. single set of four images, with the body (which also serves as a title) House/Field/Yard/Kitchen, nears the faces of four women each trapped behind a single word which defines her identify and place in an enslaver's hierarchy of the enslaved. on the other hand the undeniable individuality of each woman turn upside downs the term by which she is defined, and combines modern viewers - however briefly - with all the unknowable individuals missing inside such constructs as "yard slave."

In her earlier throws such as the "Sea Island" series (1991-93) and "Africa" series (1990-93) Weems created a salutary protoplast for the personal reinterpretation of historic archives. "From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried" is a refined and polished companion to those works. It also have the appearances more confident than the artist's "Project Room" exhibition last fall at the Museum of novel Art in which she departed from the territory of appropriated images and true copy Like the best of Weems's work, the of recent origin series offers an affective connection to the past, favorably recasting painful and racist material, conjuring ancestors into the present

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