Image from NAAM
This show has not received much attention in the neighborhood and receiving great reviews. Check it out.
Homespun beauty and historical nightmare fuse into one in “book of the bound,” an exhibit of mixed-media collages by Seattle artist-poet Carletta Carrington Wilson.
The show, at the Northwest African American Museum, zeros in on the missing voices of the slave era: those of the slaves themselves, especially the female captives.
Wilson’s blank “canvases” are antiquarian books — usually dictionaries or encyclopedia volumes — enshrouded in fabrics, beads, doilies, shells, small bones and other materials. On those materials, snippets of text appear.
Displayed alongside her artworks are Wilson’s poems, from which those snippets are taken. (In several instances, nearby headphones let you hear Wilson recite the poems.)
The effects of this mixture of words and painstaking handicraft are dense, contradictory, beguiling and unsettling.
There are two upcoming special events for the exhibit:
Artist talk/reading with Carletta Carrington Wilson: Jan 10, 2013, 7-9 pm
cover/uncover: an altered books workshop: February 23, 2013, 12-3 pm