A graduate of Rhode Island School of Design’s Glass MFA program, Doreen Garner’s performance and sculptural work juxtaposes beautiful and grotesque imagery to complicate the viewer’s visual experience. In a video piece Uniqua Revisited, the artist considers the enduring history of the Black female body as spectacle. Garner dances seductively in a clad white bikini to LL Cool J’s “Doing It,”conjuring the hypersexual Jezebel archetype. A video collage of repulsive imagery — fatty flesh, incisions made to the chest of a corpse, crawling maggots, bloody organs —projects over her. Using her body as a site of investigation, Garner maps new meaning onto her flesh that complicates the iconography and consumption of Black women’s bodies within the American imagination.
