Carrie Mae Weems’ first UK exhibition opens in London
Mark Sealy
Carrie Mae Weems, May Days Long Forgotten (film stills), 2003.
Fifteen years ago, Autograph ABP (Association of Black Photographers) organized a national lecture tour for American artist Carrie Mae Weems in England, together with events across various cities. The idea was to introduce her practice to the UK with the aim of brokering a major one-person exhibition. However, a show at that time never materialised.
By 1990, Weems was widely exhibited in the U.S. and was beginning to receive the attention of the international art world. Her storytelling through images and text, then and even more so now, is bold, poignant, beautiful, and always has a stinging political jab. Since 1990 I have had the privilege of meeting Carrie Mae Weems on a number of occasions. Her warmth and support of Autograph has been immense and we have been working together for years through a continued dialogue.
In June this year, Autograph brings Carrie Mae Weems’ work to London for a solo show at Cafe Gallery Projects. It will be the fourth time Autograph and the gallery have worked together. The idea this time was to introduce at least one complete series of Weems’ work to UK audiences. We didn’t want to fragment it as part of a theme or survey exhibition. Instead, we wanted to let a significant body of work simply stand quietly in the space and to let Weems’ work do the work.
From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, made in 1995-96, has been discussed by many as one of the most important artworks of the 1990s. Commissioned as a response to the J. Paul Getty Musuem’s exhibition "Hidden Witness: African Americans in Early Photography," featuring rare photographs of African Americans from the 1840s – 1860s, Weems provoked a contemporary reading of this historic and problematic group of images. As Thelma Golden, in Carrie Mae Weems: Recent Works 1992-1998 (George Brazlier, New York, 1999) describes: "[Weems] phototext installation created an alternative history that simultaneously embraced and rejected what the museum’s photographs represented. Instead of simply exhibiting one of her own extant pieces, she courageously and critically read the museum’s show through her own new series of works. […]" From Here… begins with an archival photograph of an African woman. The text and colored, rephotographed images create a chronology that takes us from that African woman through the documents that picture African Americans as they were and as they were imagined by others; as they pictured themselves and as they were pictured. The text is like a tone poem as it relates, in the first person, the story behind the graphic photographs.
Weems’ interest in addressing specific yet universal themes: family, race, class, gender identity, personal and collective histories continues with eloquence and elegance throughout her practice. Alongside From Here, Cafe Gallery Projects will be showing three recent works from her ongoing film project "Coming Up for Air" a series of short episodic films strung together in a non-linear fashion, held together by a loose narrative about love, sex and social taboos. A seven-and-a-half minute section entitled May Days Long Forgotten will be exhibited alongside two other episodes, Make Someone Happy and Before The Loss of You.
May Days Long Forgotten shows four young African American girls dancing around a maypole, posing for the camera bedecked in flowers and floral attire. Harkening back to 19th century photography, the work explores the construction of identity and thoughts of how this can relate to patterns of revolution (May Day) and the civil rights movement. As Kathryn M. Davis wrote in Fotophile, reviewing Weems show at P.P.O.W. Gallery in New York last year, "These girls look back at the viewer with full comprehension and acquiescence, acknowledging through Weems’ eyes their own place in connection with their past, and more important, their right to it. With this deflation of the power of the gaze, Weems successfully subverts the myth of the exotic Other, here personified by the young girls. Their loveliness is not strange; it is somehow personal and belies a certain perceived history."
From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried and Coming Up for Air will be shown from June 8 to July 3 at Cafe Gallery Projects London. See www.cafegalleryprojects.com and www.autograph-abp.co.uk
