Kara Walker

In keeping with her provocative installations of cut paper silhouettes for which she has become known, Walker continues to use the simplest of means to create vivid—if not shocking—images based on life in the Antebellum South. Fibbergibbet and Mumbo Jumbo combines the silhouettes with the artists' interest in painting, drawings and projections. In addition—for the first time in her career—Walker has incorporated video into the work.

The installation consists of a theatrical stage set made of a cloth backdrop on which a landscape has been painted in washes of coffee and pigment. Before the backdrop stands the painted wooden silhouettes of willow trees and a signpost, which bears a series of aphorisms which are either misleading, or dead ends in their own right. From behind the backdrop, a fiery light casts the shadows of Walker's characters against the painted landscape as her narrative unfolds beneath a spirited moon.

In the light of the full moon, we see the silhouette of a woman dancing the Charleston. Like many of Walker's images, the video image is both comical and immediately disarming. Walker's cut-paper and projected silhouettes form a dramatic, albeit fictitious, narrative that stems in part from a mix of nineteenth century slave stories, African American history and contemporary culture. Drawing from Victorian portraiture and decorative craft traditions, at first glance the silhouettes–of cut paper, cast shadow and now video–belie the volatile nature of Walker's narrative. As the viewer is drawn into the narrative they are deliberately left to infer who is doing what to whom and exactly what may be unfolding before them, thereby implicating the viewer in the process of acknowledging and "reading" the exaggerated, stereotypical racial and sexual characteristics that Walker bestows upon them.