February 3, 1872: The sun shines beautifully today. Our garden has been reploughed. I am so proud of the prospect of a flower yard & the orchard improvement that I feel like one just embracing the threshold of a new life. I find now the study of agriculture most necessary.(464)
So wrote Mary Virginia Montgomery in 1872. MV's diary as well as the photographs of her family provide critical primary sources and inspiration behind the installation Hurricane. I hope that Sistagraphy will join me in this installation, one of three in the exhibition.
Basically this works as it did for Silence Speaks. In Silence Speaks I enlarged and then painted a stereocard entitled Georgia Cotton Plantation. It is a very well known card (I even saw it in a Toyota commercial). One side of the card was left as originally photographed, however, on the other side, I transformed the cotton fields into fields of clouds.
We worked from the diary of Anna Matilda King, a wealthy plantation owner who lived at St. Simons Island. We used information in King's letters to bring to life Rhina, King's personal servant. We examined notions of both physical and spiritual healing. Sistagraphy members mounted black and white photographs of women around the stereocard and also mounted shelves that held recipes for "potions", herbs, and remedies. We sprinkled blue sand on the floor of the gallery and embedded objects in the sand. The color of the sand represented the ocean--water the giver of life and healer. The ocean brought us to this land and keeps untold millions of Africans beneath her waters. In Islam, it is said that water is constantly praising the Creator through her movement.
When I look to the past, I often wonder about how our ancestors managed to survive and cope with the hardship of everyday life during slavery. Even so called "free blacks" were subject to unimaginable conditions. My mind refuses to wrap itself around the living conditions of African slaves in the Carribbean and America. Black women were particularly brutalized. Interestingly enough, I realize that as African American women, we continue to be confronted with the same kind of violence that permeated the past. The black female body continues to be sexualized and devalued. But more on that later.
As I remember my ancestors, the notion of "tranference" comes to mind--the ancient practice of transferring ones feelings and emotions to another object or place--to fetishize oneself if you will--through spiritual performance and imagination. The Africans were masters at transference creating objects and rituals that allowed them to literally "shape shift" as they assumed and consumed energies from both inanimate and animate objects. Trees, plants, and rocks were sentient objects often transformed into fetishes through creative manipulation becoming masks, garments and divining tools. The Africans, the objects, the songs, and chants--all worked together to transfer individuals into another word. This ability to transfer one's self into an imaginal space, an other world, became an important tool, probably the most important tool in the survival of the Africans. It was a world to which white slave owners were not privy.
The series Hurricane uses the notion of transference and storytelling to examine a snippet of life from a young woman, Mary Virginia Montgomery. MV's life is one of contradictions. She was both slave and "free" simultaneously, her family becoming a part of a unique experiment whose roots lie in the concept of Utopia. It examines race through an imaginal space where things are not always as they seem--where symbols and stories conflict, contradict and confound. It is a trip into another world and I will tell more about the concept in my next post.
Peace,
lynnlinn
So wrote Mary Virginia Montgomery in 1872. MV's diary as well as the photographs of her family provide critical primary sources and inspiration behind the installation Hurricane. I hope that Sistagraphy will join me in this installation, one of three in the exhibition.
Basically this works as it did for Silence Speaks. In Silence Speaks I enlarged and then painted a stereocard entitled Georgia Cotton Plantation. It is a very well known card (I even saw it in a Toyota commercial). One side of the card was left as originally photographed, however, on the other side, I transformed the cotton fields into fields of clouds.
We worked from the diary of Anna Matilda King, a wealthy plantation owner who lived at St. Simons Island. We used information in King's letters to bring to life Rhina, King's personal servant. We examined notions of both physical and spiritual healing. Sistagraphy members mounted black and white photographs of women around the stereocard and also mounted shelves that held recipes for "potions", herbs, and remedies. We sprinkled blue sand on the floor of the gallery and embedded objects in the sand. The color of the sand represented the ocean--water the giver of life and healer. The ocean brought us to this land and keeps untold millions of Africans beneath her waters. In Islam, it is said that water is constantly praising the Creator through her movement.When I look to the past, I often wonder about how our ancestors managed to survive and cope with the hardship of everyday life during slavery. Even so called "free blacks" were subject to unimaginable conditions. My mind refuses to wrap itself around the living conditions of African slaves in the Carribbean and America. Black women were particularly brutalized. Interestingly enough, I realize that as African American women, we continue to be confronted with the same kind of violence that permeated the past. The black female body continues to be sexualized and devalued. But more on that later.
As I remember my ancestors, the notion of "tranference" comes to mind--the ancient practice of transferring ones feelings and emotions to another object or place--to fetishize oneself if you will--through spiritual performance and imagination. The Africans were masters at transference creating objects and rituals that allowed them to literally "shape shift" as they assumed and consumed energies from both inanimate and animate objects. Trees, plants, and rocks were sentient objects often transformed into fetishes through creative manipulation becoming masks, garments and divining tools. The Africans, the objects, the songs, and chants--all worked together to transfer individuals into another word. This ability to transfer one's self into an imaginal space, an other world, became an important tool, probably the most important tool in the survival of the Africans. It was a world to which white slave owners were not privy.The series Hurricane uses the notion of transference and storytelling to examine a snippet of life from a young woman, Mary Virginia Montgomery. MV's life is one of contradictions. She was both slave and "free" simultaneously, her family becoming a part of a unique experiment whose roots lie in the concept of Utopia. It examines race through an imaginal space where things are not always as they seem--where symbols and stories conflict, contradict and confound. It is a trip into another world and I will tell more about the concept in my next post.
Peace,
lynnlinn
posted by Marshall-Linnemeier | 6:05 PM
5 Comments:
So your post makes me think of the meaning of transference in a non-African context. Way back from Psych 100 I remember transference being described as a concept where individuals react to people in terms of what they need to see and/or what they are afraid of. This is especially the case when the individual knows very little about the person they are reacting to. For me this is a perfect description of the impact race has on us in the U.S. We all know/recognize the look of the women in the image because we are familiar with the experience of having other people's fears, beliefs, needs projected onto our bodies. Still processing but that's what I think so far.
So your post makes me think of the meaning of transference in a non-African context. Way back from Psych 100 I remember transference being described as a concept where individuals react to people in terms of what they need to see and/or what they are afraid of. This is especially the case when the individual knows very little about the person they are reacting to. For me this is a perfect description of the impact race has on us in the U.S. We all know/recognize the look of the women in the image because we are familiar with the experience of having other people's fears, beliefs, needs projected onto our bodies. Still processing but that's what I think so far.
Hi Deborah Wildflower. Glad that you are processing. I am too. That's the whole point of the blog and thanks for writing.
I was introduced to transference in the same context--the Freudian notion of the patient tranfering certain psychosocial conflicts (fears/hatreds) onto their analyst where they are acted out or as you say "individuals react to people in terms of what they need to see and/or what they are afraid of." Freud was very cleaver in his interpretations, however, I felt that most non-white cultures have been using transference since the beginning of time and in a different way. I have always felt that in many non-white cultures (and I run the risk of being very stereotypical and simplistic in my explanation), the object (fetish) becomes the thing that is reacted to as opposed to people. In ritual performance the fetish provides for individual (spiritual) needs and absorbs their fears.
In many ways, I think that race has replaced a part of this process providing the ritual space where fear and need are acted out. As you point out the black female body has become the object (fetish) where fear and need are projected onto and acted out. During slavery, black female bodies were a kind of commodity fetish in that they were both the object of sexual desire (need) by white men, yet abhorred (fear). But what happens when the fetish comes alive, when it speaks, when it resists? Enter the world of ambiguous silence, where resistance becomes a part of the ritual and body language its vehicle of expression. Insanity, of course was/is also a part of the silence. The act of resistance by black women and the rape of the her body (by both black men and white men) becomes accepted as a part of the fetishization process--she is thus objectified and made invisible. However, I must ask, could it be that black women managed to invert this objectification through a self-fetishization process (transference) that emerged within that invisible and silent space? Could this self-fetishization (transference) be her source of empowerment, her ability to re-imagine her subjective self? If so, then what does the fetish look like? Just some thoughts.
To answer your questions, yes, yes and yes. Darlene Clark Hine describes the space of resitance and silence that Black women create for ourselves as a "culture of dissemblance." Hine makes a distinction between the inner lives that Black women create for ourselves and the selves we shift into to resist and to shield ourselves from the gaze of others.
I do believe that we can sometimes empower ourselved through what I refer to in my own work as a strategic use of (hyper)invisibility. For me, though, even when I experience/witness those moments of empowerment I can never forget the other side of why I am in the position to stratgically use invisibility in the first place. Sooooo, my work focuses on the divergent pairings of how invisibility impacts our lives. Invisibility is a visual concept that erases us from representation treating us as non-existent AND it is a concept that makes us hypervisible where we are the object of intense scrutiny. Invisibility is a visual concept that confines us to the background or the shadows of representation AND it is a concept that creates the false assumption that because Blacks are not seen that we ourselves do not see. Last, invisibility depicts us in a trivializing and demeaning way (thus making us virtually as opposed to literally invisible) AND it is a visual concept that allows up to use the trope of invisiblity as a strategy for self-concealment and dissemblance. Trying to maintain one's sanity in the midst of these contradictions ain't easy.
Your notion of "divergent pairings" describes the traps that are inherent in a racialized America. We are involved in constant mutation and metamorphosis, creating a kind of identity stew. While we are not always the purveyors of the ingredients of this stew we attempt to control its temperature, determining whether or not it will simmer or boil over and we often add our own ingredients to make the dish more palpable.
This identity stew requires constant monitoring because it is always transforming. It is the way that we attempt to trick the trap of stereotypical representation, which you so aptly described. The overall goal is not to scorch and burn. There is a reason why madness is so much a part of our African American cultural fabric. Ride through our neighborhoods. The visible evidence is there. Someone forgot to tend the pot.
Yet, a sense of empowerment does reside in transformation and movement, especially when it directs us to re-create a culturally significant space through our own imaginings or re-imaginings. As you point out, our invisiblity can be demeaning, yet it can also be "a strategy for self-concealment and dissemblance."
It is the inner life, the resistance through re-invisioning or re-imagining that interests me. How can I invert and transform familiar, universal and stereotypical imagery into modes of resistance?
My new work uses conventions going as far back as the Renaissance and archetypal symbols associated with fairy tales, stories and myths as tools in this re-imagining. It is a complicated process made even more so by the contradictions and diversions that you mention. What I seek to express is the dual self, both inner and outer and I use stories, photographs and histories as points of convergence to create a different way of seeing.
For me, narrative, especially historical narrative becomes vitally important in this re-imagining and re-telling and as we will all see as we collaborate on this installation, issues of race, identity, gender and sex can be addressed and expresssed in a multitude of creative ways.
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