Alison Saar’s sculptures manifest profound metaphors between the black female body and broader
Alison Saar’s sculptures manifest profound metaphors between the black female body and broader systems of nature and time. They illustrate—perhaps even perform—oblique mythological narratives in which women gather materials from the natural world and, in turn, dissolve into it. The body itself becomes a vehicle for the collapsing of divergent times and places, invoking histories and practices from throughout the African Diaspora. In turn, the visceral shapes and rough-hewn surfaces in Saar’s sculptures manifest the artist’s own intensive, embodied labor and mastery of obstinate materials. Here, a woman’s disembodied head stands supported by a nest of her own hair. The head is carved from wood, the hair is made from metal wire. The work’s title, Deluge, makes an explicit reference to a natural phenomenon loaded with spiritual and wrathful connotations. But this biblical flood takes form as the woman’s hair. In this manner, Saar dialectically positions the female body as a mediator between nature (the form, the flood) and industry (the materials), acknowledging that their bodies are beholden to broader systems—perhaps even constructed by them, if we are to believe Foucault—while at the same time suggesting that in locating the body as the nexus where all of these forces convene, we can begin to reassert some agency.Alison Saar, Deluge (From “Silt, Soot and Smut”), 2016 -- source link
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