Kara Walker is a contemporary visual and performance artist, and professor at Columbia University. Her work employs a range of techniques from video, painting, drawing and written text to her signature, paper cut-out silhouette installations. With exhibition titles such as "My Compliment, My Enemy, My Opressor, My Love", Walker not only confronts current ideas about race and gender, but also raises the question of historical truth vs. myth. Masters, slaves, pickinini's and jemima's, engaging in various acts of violence and seduction, are archetypal figures that Walker exploits in order to expose the romanticized perceptions of this era in American history. It is this mixture of romance and horror that should create mixed feelings within the viewer of both repulsion and attraction when looking at these black on white scenes. The silhouettes function in different ways, first by refrencing a real asthetic style that was popular during colonialism, and also by creating a tension between what appears on the surface as innocent and simple. The way in which Walker uses only black and white in her installations to define these spaces also refrences the constructs of blackness and whitness and how they are dependant on each other to exist as they do. By examining these historical ideologies Walker is engaging us in the idea of white, black, male, female constructs and how they skew our perception of self as we inevitably begin to percieve ourselves through the eyes of another race or gender.
I identify with Kara Walkers work because I am also exploring ideas of identity and social constructs through my relationship with history. I admire this work because she uses her images to create a dialouge about things that people would rather not think about, let alone talk about, which forces us to confront our own predjudices.
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