24. CARRIE MAE WEEMS - A SPACE BETWEEN VIOLENCE AND COMPASSION.

Carrie Mae Weems: Reflections for Now - Barbican - LONDON.

Carrie Mae Weems - Painting the Town #3, 2021 © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York / Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin.

'It has to come through a space of compassion otherwise it is just anger.' Carrie Mae Weems.

Carrie Mae Weems's decisiveness is her strength, her response to her instincts, her power - pouring the water herself at a press conference, she waits for the microphone to work before responding to loaded questions with dignity and intelligence, consistent within a retrospective of works which are presented like a concentrated harvest. A harvest of some four decades - and it is divine to behold. Both in it's humility, it's humanity, and the sheer breadth of the artist's emotional range.

A series of paintings begin the exhibition, abstract expressionist in style, but in fact, these are documentary photographs, not paintings - 'made in the wake of demonstrations in the artist's birth town of Portland, Oregon, following the murder of George Floyd by police in May 2020. Over several months of protests, boarded-up storefronts were repeatedly painted over to erase demonstrators' messages. Within the work, the artist questions the visual language of abstraction and representation - reviewing and reminding us that Black artists have often been painted out of art history - including Norman Lewis who was an active contributor to the abstract expressionist movement since its inception. Abstraction emerges directly from a protest as a form of expression.

The rhythm of the exhibition undulates, from one room to the next and out into an in-between-space where swathes of blue velvet and white muslin house projected film works - a combination of circus tent and heavenly calm - overheard music escapes from these inter-woven curtained enclosures - layered in the air like the synaptic snaps from within artist's mind. Cross-referencing genres, soundtracks, and sound bites form a sensory collage - poised and swept up.

The film 'The Shape of Things: A Video in 7 Parts, 2021' a visual collage of extremes - devastatingly honest as Weems describes the unrelenting fear of violence from police brutality: 'Imagine the worst of the worst... and know that it is always happening', to the sublime beauty of five figures drenched in a storm including choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili who becomes enveloped by the night in a flurry of falling snow.

The artist's meditative approach to creation begins daily with music, 'music is the most important thing - everything rests on the melody', with a series of songs that remind her of her purpose. Listing Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Bob Marley, and Aretha Franklin - who she discusses in detail as 'The master standard’. Her technique of improvisation and reinvention of a media, 'taking it and breaking it', discussing the extraordinary fluidity of Franklin's vocal soaring agility to explore and propel music with an ability to define any song she sings as her own.

Carrie Mae Weems - Untitled (Woman and Daughter with Make Up) from Kitchen Table Series, 1990 © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York / Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin.

Weems' own instincts of taking and breaking are certainly in evidence within 'Reflections for Now', using her own body as the medium for exploration and exhibition.'I use myself in part because I am available, a source, a surface - framing myself as muse, witness, arbitor, and observer'.

In the iconic 'Kitchen Table Series' Weems occasionally makes direct eye contact with the viewer, the life-size portraits and open table invite the audience's gaze and allow us to observe a woman in a private domestic space which now becomes a stage set with acts which both confront and remind that life is a volatile work all of its own. Like Franklin's emotive control which invites us to reflect, so too does Weems hold up a  mirror. 'I use my own constructed image as a vehicle for questioning ideas about the role of tradition, the nature of family, monogamy, polygamy, relationships between men and women, between women and their children, and between women and other women - underscoring the critical problems and the possible resolves. In one way or another, my work endlessly explodes the limits of tradition. I'm determined to find new models to live by.'

In 'Holocaust Memorial', The artist moves with purpose between the pillars of Peter Eisenmann's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, completed in Berlin in 2005. In the projected film, Weems glides in dignified choreographed strides, arms bow - hands clap twice - hands reach up - and then returning - as if there are many figures with each repeating rhythm, an outpouring, a release, and return. 'Weems has spoken of an affinity between Black and Jewish communities, stating,'I think there is a shared sense of struggling in the country, and that, I think, forms an incredible bond between these two apparently very different groups of people'.

There are traces of violence with repeating force within this exhibition, from the causes and origins to the effects and legacies. The presentation is startling also for its dignity, tenderness, and overriding atmosphere of contemplation - creating a poised environment of reflective stillness - Weems herself asks 'No one has written about the violence in my work'.

Asking her mother what is grace, she answered: when one falls down, you reach back and help... what an offering - of love and forgiveness - the words are embedded in the work'.

Carrie Mae Weems, The Edge of Time — Ancient Rome from Roaming, 2006 © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York / Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin.

Carrie Mae Weems Reflections for Now Barbican London,
22 June – 3 September 2023.

Special thanks: Georgia Holmes.