Kat Thompson

KATHERINE THOMPSON: RAW MATERIAL

BUCHANAN HALL ATRIUM GALLERY - George Mason Exhibitions

Katherine Thompson: Raw Material features the artist’s studio-based photographs that embrace the pop visual language of product and fashion advertisements while posing questions about the troublesome connections between consumerism, visual culture, and race in America. 

About the Exhibition:

In the fall of 2017 two outraged reactions to the sale and display of raw cotton stalks as decorative home furnishings went viral on social media. The resulting national debate divided into two main camps, those that see cotton as an inert inoffensive material, acceptable for use as decoration, and those for whom a neutral view of this material is impossible, given its associations with the history of American slavery.

For Katherine Thompson, this debate, like so many other issues related to race in America, is a question about identity and visibility. The controversy is not simply about the material itself but the network of visual associations and historical connotations that tether that specific material to our understanding and assumptions about the world. What we choose to see makes the difference. 

Between Cultures

In her series Between Cultures (2019) Thompson creates multiple “self-portraits” in which she deploys a minimal vocabulary of materials including patterned fabrics, cheap mass produced home decor or craft items, and her own body. In these images she presents herself as various African American personas, based on representations of the black body, both historical and contemporary, that circulate through American popular culture in print and audio-visual media. Like advertisements, Thompson’s portraits have a deliberate artifice, due her use of inexpensive props and flat lighting. This seemingly simple staging and sometimes playful design lends the images an atmosphere of ambiguity, but a close examination of the postures, materials, and motifs she chooses to include reveal the images to be fraught with questions about our tolerance for stereotypes, and the historical materials and attitudes that propel them. 

Thompson uses herself as a model. In each image she shows aspects of her outward appearance but, because she is always disguised in her performance and subsumed by the role she is playing, she is never truly visible as a subject herself. Showing the influence of pioneering figures of conceptually driven photography such as the American artist Cindy Sherman and Cameroonian photographer Samuel Fosso, Thompson’s work inverts the normal understanding of the self-portrait as a form of self-revelation, and instead focuses on the impact of representational tropes and societal expectations on the very notion of selfhood. 

Still Lifes and Collages

This exhibition also features a selection of Thompson’s still life and collage based works. Her still life photographs (2015 -2019) cover a similar conceptual territory explored in the Between Cultures and Americana series. These images recontextualize various common items she comes across in her mining of suburban big-box craft stores to highlight these items’ strange or ironic aspects, especially when viewed through the lens of a politically polarized and racialized society. 

Thompson’s collages are a departure from the other works in the show. Here she concentrates on representations of black women in beauty culture advertisements, particularly those concerned with hair care. Her method is similar to arranging a mood board or scrapbook, in which magazine cut-outs are juxtaposed against bright patterns and other adornments. Occasionally a snippet of text is included that suggests the lengths a black woman must go to achieve their desired look. In the context of the rest of this exhibition, phrases such as “You don’t need another relaxer, you need a miracle”  are evocative of the pressures placed upon black women in a society that seems to prioritize the updating of their “look” over a conscientious engagement with their reality.