Doris Salcedo at the Perez Art Museum
Two of Doris Salcedo’s newest works, Disremembered and A Flor de Piel, were
included in the thirty-year survey of at the Perez Art Museum. Disremembered
consists of three tunics woven from a raw almost translucent silk along with
12,000 needles. The three long sleeved shirts are woven horizontally but the
distance between the stitches narrows on the arms, around the cuff and collar creating
a greater density of needles and giving the shirt more visual weight. The more
concentrated the stitches the more the needle tips flare up and out from the
fabric like a quivering porcupine. The shirts were installed in a small gallery
in the larger exhibition. One shirt hung off a single needle inserted into the
wall like it was left there at the end of the day while the others, attached to
the wall at the two shoulder seams, appear to be waiting for to be used. The second
larger work, A Flor de Piel, was a
room-sized tapestry that rippled across the floor lapping against some walls
and falling short of others. A Flor de Piel was constructed out of
preserved and flattened rose petals that were sutured together to shroud the
floor creating the effect of a dark leathery sea.
The victims of trauma and violence have been the
major themes in Salcedo’s project based work for three decades. Her new work continues to focus on the after
effects of violence, including the absence of loved ones, homelessness,
disruption, and mourning. Disremembered resulted
from Salcedo’s perception of society’s inability to mourn or to recognize another’s
loss and A Flor de Piel is a memorial
or a funerary shroud for a female victim of torture.
Pain, loss, and protest have long been source
material for artists. Alfredo Jaar and Krzyztof Wodiczko, contemporaries of
Salcedo, engage injustice and cruelty through works that bellow with
indignation. Salcedo’s work is subtler embracing
the viewer with grief rather than the cry of injury.
The body has traditionally been implied in
Salcedo’s work through its absence, for example an empty chair or bureau. The
absence in Disremembered is much more
familiar and intimate. Rather than the manufactured domestic furniture or found
object of past work Salecdo creates a handmade shirt to bring the memory of the
victim to the viewer. Disremembered is
a hairshirt or a cilice, pinned to the wall, waiting for the viewer/penitent to
take on the mantel of grief, to feel the loss of others in a very physical way
as the 12,000 headless pins prick the skin.
The recent shift in Salcedo’s work towards
garments and textiles to express loss is a powerful and poetic one. There is more
room in this work for real empathy as opposed to the detachment generated by
the found objects of earlier works. The intimacy of the materials, thread, needles
and pins, and the handmadeness of Disremembered
and A Flor de Piel enhance their
ability to implicate the viewer as we can envision wearing the shirt, shrouding
our dead and remembering our and our communities’ loss.
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