“Last year he asked me for a new body,” Walker said. She kept her project a secret and did not have the opportunity to share it with him.
“My father would wonder why I would do something so far removed from working in two dimensions,” she said, adding: “I like to think I was his best student, but I also had my own idea. »
Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, has not yet seen the new piece. But reflecting on the trajectory of Walker’s work, she said, “What amazes me is how Kara is such a profoundly powerful maker of monuments and memorials.
“The work exists as a way for us to understand collective memory and takes us through many emotions: beauty, a dystopian vision of the world, a vision of reality and imagination. »
David A.M. Goldberg, a lead product designer for Disney, who wrote an essay for the exhibition catalog, said Walker’s automatons “really remind us of the hard truths about plantation relationships that we have first understood thanks to her, through the silhouettes.” Now, through his work in robotics, he adds: “She’s questioning what makes it so uncomfortable. Is it their darkness? Is it because they are not fluid and animated characters?”
Walker confronted his own fear of technology by first using ChatGPT to write down the aphorisms Fortuna dispenses. She used AI suggestions such as “Afro-pessimism” and “liberation struggles.” Yet the results seemed unremarkable. “I said to myself: ‘No, it has to have fire! It has to have soul!’ » She ended up writing more than 100 fortunes herself, proving that human sensitivity was not yet replaceable.
At the Brooklyn Navy Yard, alone, Fortuna stood upright, his arms at his sides. In the snow that fell to the ground, a message stood out: “Artists cannot be expected to follow instructions.”
Gn entert
News Source : www.nytimes.com
