Exhibition Review: Carrie Mae Weems, Down Here Below
Installation view, Carrie Mae Weems, Down Here Below, 2022
Jack Shainman Gallery, 513 W 20th Street, New York, NY
© Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
The New York Times has defined her as ‘one of the more interesting artists working in the gap between art and politics’ and thanks to her moral force and body of work, she is widely renowned as one of the most influential contemporary American artists living today.
Carrie Mae Weems has dedicated her life to the depiction of African Americans, playing a significant role in creating an identity awareness for the new generations since the 70s.
Themes such as race, injustice, family, identity, sexism, class, political systems, and the consequences of power are central to her artistic work – by the way she investigates them she is an ‘artist engagée’.
Installation view, Carrie Mae Weems, Down Here Below, 2022
Jack Shainman Gallery, 513 W 20th Street, New York, NY
© Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
For her new solo exhibition, Down Here Below, the Jack Shainman Gallery – which continues to represent her since 2008 – displays several large-scale installations highlighting Weem’s decades-long engagement.
With the first two celestial works exhibited at the entrance to the gallery, North Star (2021) and Down Here Below (2019), the artist invites the visitor to create a necessary space for reflection.
From here, we are projected in the real reflection. What are the necessary tools and conditions for revolutionary change and protest? The seminal work And 22 Millions Very Tired and Very Angry People (1990-1991) provides an answer with fifteen unique large-format Polaroids, each presenting a quotidian but evocative subject captioned with short phrases, while the multi-part installation, The Push, The Call, The Scream, The Dream (2020), illustrates resulting moments of action.
Installation view, Carrie Mae Weems, Down Here Below, 2022
Jack Shainman Gallery, 513 W 20th Street, New York, NY
© Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
Another large-scale installation makes us meditate on the phenomenon of ongoing racial violence and the depersonalization of its victims. Repeating the Obvious (2019) makes us realize just how much violence and its unreasonable motives are exhausting in their recurrence. An air of discouragement momentarily spreads in the exhibition space, but Weems reminds us with Seat or Stand And Speak (2021) that in response to this, the possibility of taking action and affecting change is physically possible.
Installation view, Carrie Mae Weems, Down Here Below, 2022
Jack Shainman Gallery, 513 W 20th Street, New York, NY
© Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
Carrie Mae Weems’s new solo exhibition Down Here Below will be on view at Jack Shainman Gallery, 513 W 20th Street, New York, NY, from January 13 - February 19, 2022.
Written by Angelica Cantù Rajnoldi
Edited by Jana Massoud
