Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video

Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video is the first exhibition by an African-American woman at the Guggenheim. The plausibility of that scenario and the national-political sensibility it engages go under the knife in Carrie Mae Weems’s challenging and crucial presentation. Consider work like her 2003 The Louisiana Project series: in a number of ghostly, almost incandescent photographs, Weems stands in front of Southern plantation estates dressed in the garb of a nineteenth-century domestic worker. With her back to the viewer, she stays at a remove from the romanticized gravitas of American mythology, cast as its actor but ambivalent about performing its roles. Her sumptuous formalism renders the scene with a forceful sense of presence, but that ordered containment also rings as illusory: what emerges through Weems’s exhibition is a key thematic dilemma — how to imagine oneself in an historical subject-position whose very trajectory is always already sketched by forces of domination. In work both difficult and generous, Weems opts to express the sheer trouble of such a cultural impasse.