JTF (just the facts): A mix of framed photographs, a sculpture, and a video work projected in a circular cyclorama, installed in the main gallery space and the smaller upstairs gallery.
The show includes the following works:
- 1 video (color, sound, in seven parts), 2021, 40 minutes, in an edition of 3+1AP
- 1 megaphone, 1 chair, 1 box, 2021, in an edition of 10
- 9 archival pigment prints, 2021, sized 59×88 inches, in editions of 5+1AP
(Installation shots and video stills below.)
Comments/Context: As we get incrementally further from the recent years of the global pandemic, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the art made during that particular traumatic moment has its own unique signature. As the years pass, and we no longer wear masks with the same vigilance and are no longer isolated from our families and friends by preventative lockdowns and quarantines, the intensely charged emotions of those months and years have become trapped in a kind of historical amber. And while we haven’t yet resolved all of the divisive issues that were raised at that time, most pandemic-era artworks still feel firmly lodged in the tensions of that specific atmosphere, and to engage with them fully means putting ourselves back into that mindset.
All of the works in Carrie Mae Weems’s show at Gladstone Gallery were made in 2021, and so pull us back into that pandemic mode. And in starting fresh with a new representation relationship, this show rewinds to some works shown at her last gallery show in New York in 2022 (reviewed here) and to others found in an installation at the Park Avenue Armory in late 2021. Seen together, the show feels like a snapshot of Weems’s COVID-era thinking, and in particular, how her ongoing explorations of race, prejudice, injustice, and memory were shaped and informed by those circumstances (and the associated politics of that time), and how those same themes continue to morph and replay over time, connecting the past to the present.
Photographically, roughly half of this show consists of images from Weems’s 2021 series “Painting the Town”, as installed on the edges of the main gallery space and upstairs in a smaller room. These large scale color photographs were made in Portland, Oregon (Weems’s hometown), in the days after the Black Lives Matter protests there in response to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. As a result of the many business closures during the pandemic as well as to protect against damage from potential protesters and looters, many of the downtown storefronts had been boarded up, the windows and doors covered with fresh plywood and other industrial materials. During the ensuing marches and rallies, anti-racist slogans and other graffiti were sprayed on these available surfaces, and in the days after, those same marks were systematically removed, overpainted by flat blocks of color, mostly in black.
Weems’s photographs of these boarded up storefronts function on several levels. On the surface, they are seductively textural abstractions, with geometric squares of black laid atop rough hewn wood with almost gestural intention. Without knowing the pandemic or BLM backstories, they might reasonably be seen as found urban abstractions, with compositional echoes back to black-and-white AbEx photographs of painted walls by Aaron Siskind or to graphically bold 1950s era paintings by Robert Motherwell. But weighed down by the recent traumas, these images by Weems carry additional layers of emotional resonance, the prevailing sense of lonely emptiness and blocked closure of the pandemic then further decorated with the deliberate erasure of the sentiments of the activists. What’s left behind is hollow blocks of tactile nothingness, the urgent communications of the moment dampened and ultimately silenced.
The other half of the show is a large video installation, with blue footlights surrounding the outside. Inside the curtain, “The Shape of Things” (from 2021) is projected onto an encircling cylindrical screen, also known as a “cyclorama”, a once popular visual entertainment from the 19th century. The five-channel, seven-part film is an amalgam of ideas, mixing references to some of Weems’s own video works with snippets of found, documentary, and otherwise staged footage. Made in the moment after the end of the Trump administration (and the chaos of the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol), with the masked faces of the pandemic still very much present, the film reshuffles the inputs into short vignettes, wrestling with the circus of American politics and the enduring challenges of racism and violence.
Seen in the new context of a moment weeks before the 2024 election, where Trump (once again) and Harris (the first Black woman to be nominated for president) are set in a close race, Weems’s work feels rooted in a view that the cycles of history are repeating again and again. The twisting pathways of birds in flight open the film, the ever-shifting flock seeming to endlessly double back on itself, and soon Weems moves on to interrogating what she calls the “landscape of memory”, where past and future are inextricably linked together. In Weems’s hands, the stubborn instability between white and Black in America jumps around in time and takes many forms – back to the 1960s (in matched sets of white pro-segregation protesters and Black anti-segregation marchers), forward to Trump supporters overrunning the capital, back to silhouetted plantation ladies having tea, and forward to the woman calling 911 on a supposedly threatening Black bird-watcher in Central Park, the confrontations and necessary resistance seemingly ever present. Then a literal clown arrives to lead the band, Weems incisively doubling down on the loose circus theme as applied to the American politcal reality.
Several of the sections in the latter half of the film bring some personal agency back into the discussion. After an interlude reprising Weems’s poignant motif of blue-tinted Black men in hoodies disappearing as a result of police violence, larger than life figures are sensually doused with falling water and snow (almost like a ritual cleansing), with questions of how we measure a life (and where we might act to change the world around us) drifting through the air in the form of a voiceover. This questioning then gets more personal in the next segment, as bright light momentarily illuminates figures standing in the enveloping darkness, seemingly singling out (and thereby encouraging) a diverse set of individuals to take charge of crafting a new kind of world. But when we reach the final section, the cycle seems to fall back into place, with Weems herself moving back and forth on a flowery swing flanked by figures once again imprisoned, hooded, and turned away.
As we stand of the precipice of the upcoming election, with no foreknowledge of which forces may ultimately prevail and what tumultuous events may take place along the way, Weems’s vision of the contested American politcal landscape of a few years ago feels grimly prophetic, but ultimately quietly hopeful. Her work reminds us that we have seen many of these themes and actions before (and likely will again), but it also motivates us to step out of the traps of this rigid back-and-forth framework to search for something more durably inclusive. As an artwork, “The Shape of Things” is uneven and stylistically uneasy, but even with its flaws, it provokes enough broad ideas to transcend its slightly dated pandemic-era roots. Seen together, the various pieces of this show, and its look back to the very recent past, make me all the more curious to learn where (artistically) Weems is now, and what she makes of yet another precipitous turn of this cycle.
Collector’s POV: The photographs in this show are priced at $100000 each. Weems’s work has only been intermittently available in the secondary markets in the past decade. Recent prices have ranged between roughly $5000 and $240000.
The boards and walls photographs look stunning. To be made aware of that aspect of redaction adds to their power.