Simone Leigh’s work is densely layered, each form she creates loaded with historical, spiritua
Simone Leigh’s work is densely layered, each form she creates loaded with historical, spiritual, cultural, and biological associations. Her interest in black female subjectivity and black women’s labor has recently expanded into the realm of architecture. In installations like this one here—Cupboard, presented in Atlanta in 2014—Leigh layers architectural plans atop her existing vocabulary of craft practices and bodily forms. She draws inspiration from her intensive research and extensive fieldwork in a wide range of African countries, with a particular eye toward the distinctive huts and other dwellings often built by women. In typical fashion, this installation here not only refers to such architecture, but is also a response to a 1940s photograph by Edward Weston of a roadside diner in Natchez, Mississippi—a giant mammy figure whose skirt customers would enter to eat their pancakes. Leigh’s metal replication of the skirt’s shape is paradoxically transparent and without a door; inside dangles a cluster of cowrie shell sculptures cast from watermelons, tactile and tantalizingly visible yet inaccessible. By linking a symbol of 20th-century American cultural racism with such diasporic iconography, Leigh’s sculpture provocatively suggests a web of cross-temporal, trans-Atlantic connections. As in much of her practice, these densely layered references are all collapsed into an understated, materially transparent object.Simone Leigh, Cupboard, 2014 -- source link
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