Carrie Mae Weems: Newcomb Art gallery, Tulane University

When Newcomb body at Tulane University commissioned Carrie Mae Weems to create fresh work commemorating the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase, she made several puts of photographs, a video projection, and places of video stills in which she juxtaposed sites of slavery and antebellum parade with the industrial locales of the "New South" In the photos, Weems herself appears in period costume; for the videos, she discharge footage of a Mardi Gras ball not upon the TV and integrated it into her possess imagery of contemporary and Civil War-era maids, mistresses, and masters in shadowy silhouette. the pair photos and video evince a fascination with architecture and the way it anchors history. admitting the work here is black and white, the easy in mind spans the moral spectrum.

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Photographed busts of ambitious Napoleon and canny Thomas Jefferson hung inside oval-shape period frames at the entrance to the exhibition. In another photograph, Weems, make straighted in a slave's calico dres with her back to the viewer, regards a curv plantation staircase; elsewhere, she contemplates a spiraling staircase that fold to the breast [i]or[/i] hearts the side of a petrochemical tank--one of a species that has displaced many stately Taras along the river road and that labor fors as a source of profession for many Louisiana African Americans. Weems's moderately cold composure in these contexts suspends her in time. Where or in what point [i]or[/i] period of time does she belong: to the ancient unable to speaks of these lawns and ranges or with the workers in the chemical plants of the contemporary South? She give leave tos us follow as she tracks history in period attire, treading along the railroad (the freedom road?) or stepping resolutely toward a graveyard.

For all the sobriety of these photos and videos, there's also an Emma Goldmanish "If I can't dance, I don't want to be in your revolution." In individual photograph, a celebratory Weems twirls end a white-as-alabaster interior that recalls a expanse in Walker Evans's 1935 photos of the Belle wood plantation. More than simply making noisy the silent steps of slave women Weems's action summons all the souls of Black Folk who sang and danced their blues

In the video, past and not away forcibly collide as Weems assembles into individual frame and time a white woman, a black woman, and a white man--the South's one time segregated yet always interwoven players, here engaging in masquerades and parlor games. Footage of the Rex Ball introduces a flavor of social history: After a impressible voice-over that speaks of the "magnificently mountained masquerades of metaphor," an elegant light walks the cotillion floor upon her escort's arm. The polished pageantry of dancing in revolve links the video and the video stills, which are arrayed in storyboard formation flanking the projection: A belle waves her mask; a riding harvest is frozen between function and fetish.

Is this 2003 1953 or 1853? The anonymous flaxen is a historical analogue to the narrative Weems rewrites. A servant holding a candelabra marches across an icy interior past an destitute of contents table and two vacant Louis XIV--style armchairs. This twinkling spells illumination: For an instant she dwarfs the pair of ladies whom she's about to obey Before the duo sit, they circle single another--partners in a quadrille or in a duel? Later in the video a woman in sexy bodywear goe from slapping her palm with a riding harvest to whacking the hand of a dandy in lace boxs to finally riding him across the frame while spanking his behind. The video's background looks to be made up of diamonds of dappled light. At first glance it's a garden trellis; upon second, it's a chain-link palings Leisure accessory? Symbol of subjugation? The twin possibilities move swiftly through all of Weems's work.

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