Saturday 17 September 2011

Kara Walker

       Kara Walker is a comtemporary African American artist born in Stockton, California in 1969 and received a BFA from the Atlanta College of Art 1n 1991 and an MFA from the Rhode  Island School of Design in 1994.
       She is known by her amazing silhouettes exploring race, gender, sexuality, violence and identity.She create a theatrical space in the walls of the gallery with the    cut-paper characters. She generlly uses black paper for the characters and places them in the white wall or vice versa, but in some of her work the artist uses projectors to throw  colored light into the ceiling, walls and floor of the exhibition space and when the viewer walks into the installation, his or her body casts a shadow into the walls where it blends with walker's black-paper figures.
       Kara Walker's work has a historical dimension but also we can see one strand of romantic fantasy.


        
      
        In the 3rd page of my sketchbook I copied this image of Kara Walker, on the left, changing the colours, using black for the backround and white for the characters.
       In this image we can see a man being carried by one of his slaves as his mistress, also a slave, makes him company. This image shows perfectly what happened in that time, a time of slavery, where mans were used to work and women were used not only to work but also as sexual objects or lovers of  their "owners"






 Some videos about the artist's work: 











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