Carrie Mae Weems at P.P.O.W - New York, New York

Carrie Mae Weems's of recent origin "Sea Islands" works are evocative of her possess cultural and spiritual journey in search of her African heritage. Compos of photographic pieces and a series of text-inscribed ceramic dishes station in glass cases, this display had the look of a documentary presentation, an irony which veiled the highly emotional and autobiographical easy in mind of the work.

The cluster of ceramic plates, which were plain, manufactured kitchen earthen-ware were imprinted with a recurring heading: "Went looking for Africa." Differing rejoinders were paired with this line, collectively forming a kind of continuous piece of poetry or song. One plate had the reply "and found Africa here at a profile angle in my mother's living-room"; another read, "and base Eckstine, James Brown, Sistah Souljah singing salt-peanuts upon the A train."

Weems's search for her identity and ethnic history took her to the Sea Islands, not on the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, where the Gullah tillage still survives among the descendants of the slaves (originally the Gola tribe from West Africa) who were brought here in the 17th and 18th centuries. That this metaphoric reunion with African agriculture and Weems's process of self-discovery took place in America is revelatory of the neighborhood persistence and transformation of African tillage on American soil. Here, as Weems writes, Africa is "found [in] uncombed heads, acrylic nails & Afrocentric attitudes Africans find laughable."

Weems explores the African/Afro-American interface with the seeming detachment and objectivity of the anthropologist. Her untitled groupings of photographs of the Gullah community are placed in unobtrusive, elegant, black frames; the plates are secur within vitrines. on the other hand this clinical presentation also underscores the way in which Weems's material has already been "framed" or redefined according to the conventions of Western tillage For example, Weems nears three triptychs showing the faces and profiles of slaves from the Sea Islands. These images are taken from tiny 19th-century daguerreotypes (in Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology) which the artist has now tinted and puffed up up to life size. In this fresh permutation, something of the sature and individuality of these men and women has been restored, smooth though the images continue to be haunted through the cold objectivity with which these exotic and unfamiliar subdues were originally posed and photographed.

As part of the "Sea Islands" series, Weems also not aways enlarged images of slave quarters, houses, the landscape, a store, a "praise-house" and a Gullah graveyard. Glimpses of relatively new intrusions such as trailers and hubcaps are also included. These photographs, many of which are juxtaposed with body s which relate some of the folk realitys and lore of the Gullah community's fragmented and elusive history, are compelling for their candor and directness. Unlike Weems's altered and enlarged daguerreotype triptychs, these images fetch without obvious commentary the lingering clash of tillages on the Sea Islands.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group