The Rich Soil Down There

The caricatured and stylized figures in Walker's provocative tableaux evoke racial stereotypes in acts that are perplexing, violent, and suggestive. The zones of shameful and uncomfortable relationships-both literal and fantastic-force the viewer to consider issues of race and sexuality. Although the figures are detailed, their forms and the narrative remain essentially ambiguous. Walker intends her images to be "Rorschach-esque," inviting individual viewpoints, experiences, and ideas to be prompted by the relationships she designs. Walker expands upon the traditional silhouette, creating figures and narratives that confront unsettling and oppressive relationships between individuals, genders, and races. For the artist, the silhouette was a near-perfect solution to her effort to "try and uncover the often subtle and uncomfortable ways racism, and racist and sexist stereotypes, influence and script our everyday lives."In The Rich Soil Down There, every black figure seems smothered by either a white figure or a white substance. Although some of the dress evokes the antebellum South, the artist rejects what she sees as the South's continued longing for a romanticized past: "This longing retains all of its former power in the form of such dubious cultural manifestations as romance novels, pornographic fantasies, . . . and collectible figurines." This work both complicates our view of history and helps to dispel such fantasies.

In 19th-century America, many homes boasted cut-paper silhouettes framed on a wall. Small and delicate, the silhouettes preserved the profiles of loved ones or showed happy domestic scenes. Walker has transformed this sweet, safe tradition, making elaborate tableaux of racial and sexual violence in the pre-Civil War South. Her open-ended scenes do not tell a simple tale. Instead, their ambiguity is meant as a prompt for our own ideas and thoughts.

 

 

"The Rich Soil Down There" represents, in black and white silhouette, human figures in nineteenth century dress whose appearances exaggerate stereotypes of African physiognomy. The composition addresses issues of shame, eroticism, racial and sexual stereotypes and violence, and the history of slavery. Walker likens the silhouette aesthetic to the nature of stereotypes themselves, in which the complexities of individual identities, situations, and personalities are simplified and distorted into easily readable, caricatured forms.