Housed in specially designed structures on the Art Quad, the two-part installation, “Heave,” incorporates photography, video, text, spoken word, music, projection along with various design & architectural strategies to probe the devastating effects of violence in our life and time. Her work’s sustained investigations of social conflict explores the spectacle of violence in our contemporary lives.

HEAVE, PART 1 – A CASE STUDY  (A QUIET PLACE?)
Pavilion 1 invites access to a viewing porch through which visitors watch a multimedia installation, watch live game playing, and listen to explorations of the trauma of loss, the tragedy of assassinations, killings, murders and the persistence violence directed against black men. From wars, revolts & revolutions to the extraordinary prime-time assassinations that rocked this country to mass school, nightclub and street to the killing of Trayvon Martin, violence is a personal choice, a twisted display of power. Heave explores the trauma of loss, the tragedy of assassinations, killings, murders and the persistence violence directed against black men. Over the course of the exhibition, video gamers are invited to sign up online to play one of two popular video games on violence over the internet.

HEAVE, PART 2
Heave centers on various forms of violence generally and of the violence historically directed against women and people of color. A screening room for Weems’ searing and rhythmic videos on various forms of violence generally and of the violence historically directed against women and people of color. Heave is a poetic musing—a sorrow song—a howl, a video constructed out of made and found footage that picks and pecks at the various forms of violence threatened to destroy us all, from domestic abuse to domestic terror, from animal extinction to environmental disaster, from political upheaval to social unrest, from the arms of the states to unarmed black men, from the failures of the left to the rise of the right, from the persistence of escalating wars to the assassinations of national leaders. And in this context, within the relentless noise of our daily consumption of tragedy and hypocrisy, one could sense the pulsing, the pushing, and the quaking, the slow eruption, the heave.

Carrie Mae Weems (US)

Department of Architecture, Art, and Planning; Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media; Cornell Library