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Contact: Margaret Crane
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Kara Walker Activates Her REDCAT Installation With Shadow Puppet Performances

L.A. Premiere Of Walker's Projected Light Installations And Film & Video Works To Feature New Film By Walker

Kara Walker
For the Benefit of All Races
2002
cut paper & projection

Kara E. Walker's Song Of The South

September 3 - October 23, 2005
Opening reception: Friday, September 2, 6-9 pm, with a performance by the artist at 7pm

Closing reception: Sunday, October 23, 5-8 pm with a performance by the artist at 6 pm

View the event

Los Angeles, April 16 -- REDCAT presents new work by Kara Walker. Best known for her work reducing representation to its base with her use of black paper cut outs, Walker will expand upon some of her more recent experiments into projected light and shadow, live performance, and film and video.

Kara Walker's use of the silhouette -- a decorative craft once used for portraits and caricatures - has historically been an effective way of simplifying complex ideas. It is akin to stereotyping, in which situations and individual identities are reduced to easily recognizable and digested forms. But what Walker does to notions of race is not so much to simplify them as to reveal them as constructed and complex. These challenging, "historical" shadow dramas depict unseemly acts of sex, birth and play that remind us of a slippery separation between dominance and desire. Her intricately crafted images may appear to be mere shadows on the wall but, as shadows are the result of the projection of light, the narratives we derive from and impose upon these silhouettes are the result of our own projections. Walker takes generally accepted notions of blackness and race and complicates them into near oblivion, unraveling and disarming hundreds of years of American race relations by rejecting our insatiable appetite for predigested meaning.

Walker's installation at REDCAT expands upon her 2004 installation and performance at the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia, Fibbergibbet and Mumbo Jumbo: Kara E. Walker in Two Acts featuring a kinetic, theatrical set as well as video and a live performance that becomes incorporated into the installation. The artist will "perform" in the Gallery at REDCAT at her opening on September 2 as well as at her closing reception on October 23, 2005. For her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Walker will also present her video, Testimony (2004) as well as a new film, premiering at REDCAT. Walker will also present one or more installations that incorporate colored gels cast on the wall by overhead projectors. Related works have been presented at Brent Sikemma Gallery, New York, Kunstverein Hannover, and the Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Kara Walker received her M.F.A. in painting/printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994. Her work has been exhibited at the Drawing Center, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Kunstverein Hannover; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 1997, she received a MacArthur Foundation Award, and in 2002 she represented the U.S. at the São Paulo Biennale, Brazil. Walker recently completed a permanent installation at The New School for Social Research in New York. She was born in Stockton, California, and lives and works in New York. Kara E. Walker's Song of the South is the artist's first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.

This exhibition is made possible in part by the generous support of The Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

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