Between Worlds - Carrie Mae Weems, Everson Museum, Syracuse

Art in America, May, 1999 by Ernest Larsen

Certainly, Weems's theme of culture as a fragile container for transformative imagination receives numerous treatments in the "Sea Islands" series. There are word lists ("Mpinda, Nguba, Goobers, Peanuts") as well as lively depictions of the ways that local merchants decorate their storefronts. The installation also includes a group of 29 commemorative plates, titled Went Looking for Africa (1992), which are inscribed with allusive texts that sometimes mock and sometimes lament the possibility of finding traces of Africa right here in the U.S.: "and found / uncombed heads / acrylic nails & / Afrocentric attitudes / Africans / find laughable." Quite unexpectedly, what is being commemorated is not some great event, person or place, but the mundane act of searching for identity.

Most of the photos in the "Sea Islands" series are obviously unposed documents of Weems's explorations, but several are composed tableaux not unlike the pictures she made for the "Kitchen Table" series; they were even produced before she visited the Sea Islands, as if she'd already accomplished the journey in her imagination. In one, Weems assumes the mournful character, radiant dress and white headkerchief of a young Gullah woman. Lit candies on a small table hint that a hoodoo ceremony is occurring. Unwilling, it seems, to show us the "real" Gullah woman, Weems also refuses to gloss over that refusal. Instead she invents the woman, modestly contributing to the Western history of self-portraiture as fiction. Or not so modestly: over the shoulder of Weems's fictional alter ego is an oval-framed portrait of an unidentified woman in a severe dark dress buttoned to the neck. This female "overseer" is apparently white and rather grim in visage. The conjunction of two kinds of portraiture is, in this setting, ominous: the presence of the white woman, as emblematic oppressor, appears to motivate the suffering expressed so dramatically by Weems's figure. The source of evil is right there over the shoulder of this seeming Gullah sorceress, and the outcome of the struggle severely in doubt. At this moment the psychological efficacy of Gullah culture's persistent embrace of its folkloric tradition becomes, for us as viewers, a felt reality.

Following her trip to the Sea Islands, Weems traveled to West Africa. One upshot of this journey was the "Africa" series, constructed around photos of landscapes and ancient buildings in the environs of Djenne. In this room installation, the walls were lined with wallpaper whose design (a stylized female figure almost hidden by foliage) was appropriated from the endpapers of George Bernard Shaw's 1933 book A Black Woman in Her Search for God. Ladders and a chaise from West Africa occupied the center of the space, with pride of place given to a three-panel, two-sided embroidered folding screen that Weems designed. Her interest in objects and furniture, and in converting gallery space into an elaborate domestic arena, reached another level in this installation, very nearly overtaking the interest of the photographs themselves. Also more complex are the textual strategies within the series: while still using short printed texts in panels, Weems also begins etching texts into the glass over certain photographs.