ON - Carrie Mae Weems
http://carriemaeweems.net/galleries/kitchen-table.html
I have been, throughout the course of my mind map, been rather interested/held in and by the idea of transience…briefness…shortness…fleetingness. And how it’s a string of those ephemeral moments that build together to create our life (as it looks when we’ve passed on). This is what I like most of all about Weems’ Kitchen Table Series (1990): looking from still photo to still photo, I can sense movement. And not only movement, but the emotion that compels the movement. Like a babbly river, or a time-lapse video of a city neon at night. The shifting positions, the shifting subjects — Weems always physically present, as one is in their own life — the shifting moods, at that same kitchen table surge together to transfix me with a sense of life as it happens. It makes me think. The same room you get proposed to may be the same room in which you both decide to divorce. Or, for example, I pass my grade school on occasion and find it weird that I was six there, in the field I look at now when twenty-five. I could’ve have imagined what I’d be like, just like today I can’t imagine what I’ll be like. But I also can’t imagine what I’ve been like! It’s loony!
And to bring up again the fact that Weems is present in each photograph of this series. I love that! It reminds me — I am my eyes for life, and my heart for life, and my body for life. I will always be a host at my table, and a guest to life. Some days it’s true I want to serve myself something rancid, but I think (hope!) aging is delivering grace. Graciousness towards myself. So I want to think with love when I set my days. Small extract from a poem I wrote: “Now I’ll never be behind me / I am always the eye; I remain.” I’m definitely tempted to take a photo of myself in my room everyday now. I forgot these ‘dull’ moments are so precious.
I’m particularly attached to this photograph I’ve included with Weems and her head bent down, maybe sad, the bottle of wine on the table and the phone sat lonely in the foreground. Are we waiting on a specific call!? It’s so human. It looks like a scene out of a birthday I’ve had. And I don’t say that in a sad way, but in a relieved way. We are humans just like any other.








