You may
have to look twice. Anywhere else, Renee Stout's small-scale
assemblages and box sculptures would stand out, but at that
supermarket-size emporium of anthropological relics and
biological errata as well as folk, outsider, visionary and
tribal African art known as Barrister's Gallery, Stout's stuff
fits in all too well. Remarkably local in tone, it's as if
Joseph Cornell's ghost had collaborated with Marie Laveau's
voodoo spirits. Just looking at them can cause old Dr. John
songs to start spinning in the mind.
Stout is
actually based in Washington, D.C., but compensates with
frequents visits to this city and its fabled river and flea
market. Widely exhibited, with work in the Smithsonian
collection, she bases much of her output on her personal
experiences in particular, as well as on African-American
culture in general, all of which come together in her fictive
alter ego, one Fatima Mayfield, a spiritual advisor and
proprietress of a voodoo botanica. Fatima is said to
specialize in charms and talismans useful in matters of love
and/or money.
One of
Stout's pieces, Portrait of Fatima at 45, is a shelf
with a mixture of colorful bottles and some rather nicely
painted wooden blocks depicting aspects of Fatima's body: her
hand, her ear with an adjacent cornrow, her staring eye, her
belly with its tattoo of the voodoo spirit Erzulie, her lips,
legs and so forth. A woman of many parts, her various bodily
and bottled components appear formed and colored by a uniquely
vivid history. While Portrait is a loose yet highly
polished assemblage, Fatima and Black 9 is more folksy,
with components that hark to both Africa and the ghetto. A
series of painted panels with hand-scrawled signs and text as
well as African fetish-like clusters of talismanic miscellany,
it's a story about a dude called Black 9 and his fateful
encounter with Fatima, whom he initially dismissed as a "ho"
because of her purple sequined dress, blackberry lipstick and
sunglasses. "No she's not, she's a root woman," the narrator
retorts. What transpires is a long story in which the
impudent, if poetic, Black 9 finds out the hard way that it
don't pay to mess with no root woman. (Stout's narratives come
across like feministic Ishmael Reed tales.)
Some works,
for instance, Device to Stop a Man From Lying, are
improvised experiments in ballistic voodoo technology, while
others such as Trapped by the Past are more elegiac. A
triptych of three found-object assemblages, Trapped
features a mix of old photos and lost objects, and they are
all just bits of junk, yet when arranged "just so," they take
on a life of their own and become the visual equivalents of
dream narratives. In this series, Stout keeps the spirits busy
while keeping everyone else on their toes.
