Karen Graffeo
Lenticular photograph, 8 x 8 inches. $250
Lenticular photograph, 8 x 8 inches. $250
Statement
I have tried to pin my fears to this earth so that they will not follow me.
My Mama Pearl’s church had two doors, and the men entered one door. The women entered the tiny wooden sanctuary through the other door. The preacher I remember as an angry man who referred to his sermons as The Good News. I most remember the sermons that explained situations that required angels to manifest themselves to mortals. The first thing an angel would shout to a person is “Fear Not”. The preacher explained it this way. “Fear Not” he yelled the words of comfort and told that the angel appeared to Mary the Virgin in her room and announced “because of your worthiness you are with child by a ravishing of the Holy Ghost”. I grew up afraid and exotic vocabulary words stayed in my curious child mind: Virgin, Ravishing, and Holy Ghost.
Another “Fear Not” sermon told about the angel manifestation that blinded the wicked Saul and transformed him from sinner Saul, to servant Paul. I feared that either sinning or sinlessness could trigger an angel to manifest. Mama Pearl weighed 93 pounds and she died when she was 93. I imagined that she used up a pound a year until she just departed like air to her own angel incarnation. She wore dark dresses, her long white braids wrapped around her head; she did not believe in hair cuts, jewelry, airplanes, or putting pictures on the wall. When I turned 12 years old, her Christmas gift to me was my own cemetery plot beside the church in Mississippi. She walked me to my plot and explained that if I accepted salvation, I would escape the mortification of the flesh and be cloaked in a glorified body that is genderless, does not dance, feel pain or eat for all of eternity. I have spent most of my life running from that hot dirt waiting beside that church in Mississippi. My constant prayer as a child was to beg God that if he thought I was worthy that he would not send either an angel or a ravishing Holy Ghost, and if I was wicked to please not strike me blind, just tell my mother or Mama Pearl to let me know what he had on his mind.
Mama Pearl was the matriarch and the arbiter of morality for the family. After we worked in the fields she always supervised the swimming outings to the chilly Cedar Creek. The water of Cedar Creek was icy swift, and exactly the same color as root beer. She had a dependable ritual each time we were in the water. She would scold us from the sandy, rocky shore, wade in for more emphatic emphasis and then stumble all the way into the water. Once the stumbling was accomplished she would announce “Now that I am wet, I might as well swim”. She swam powerfully, dark dress swirling beneath the dark water. Her braids would loosen and her white waist length hair would unravel and float on top of the water like magic snakes. She was my first angel manifestation, fully woman, human and passionately connected to the water, the earth. This sacred vision has ignited my passion for raw honest beauty, and fueled a quest to cherish each moment of this fragile human mortality.
Objects and images seem to carry spiritual import long after humans depart. So for me, making images is a way to stir the language of the angels and to try to manifest both mystery and truth.
Fear Not.
Now that I have fallen into Life, I might as well swim.
Biography
Karen Graffeo is an active multi-media artist creating work in both experimental and documentary photography including an 8 year long term photo/essay documentation of Roma (Gypsy) refugee encampments in Europe. She also does performance and installation based works. She has had numerous national and international solo exhibitions, including a teaching and installation residency at Ulster Art Academy in Belfast Northern Ireland and a lecture and exhibition that opened March 2007 at SACI University in Florence, Italy. She has toured the continuing documentary exhibition “Let Us Now Praise the Rom” i.e. (Gypsy) in Paris, Italy, Romania, and in Ithaca, New York. . She has lectured about Roma groups that have been forced to relocate due to dire humanitarian conditions and political turmoil. In November of 2005 her work was presented at Miami Basel Art Fair by New York curator Franklin Sirmans for his exhibition and presentation about photographers and self portraiture. Her work is included in public collections, private collections, nationally and internationally and in past gallery representations in Japan, Paris, New York, San Francisco, Ireland, and Birmingham.<[p>
Karen Graffeo’s work has been published in the following: Aperture Magazine, Contemporary Southern Photographers, July 1989 issue: Number Magazine, The Seven Virtues of Photography, Spring 1990; Black and White, An Australian journal of contemporary figurative photography, Fall 1997; in the book edited by Nelson Blancourt Visions of Angels published in 1996 by S Editions of Smithmark Publishers; in the book Our Grandmothers published in 1998 by Stewart, Tabori and Chang; and in numerous literary journals and web based publications.
At the University of Montevallo, Karen Graffeo has received the University Scholar Award in 2005 for her current photographic project documenting life in Roma refugee encampments in Europe. She has visited Roma encampments in Romania, France, and Italy to document conditions for Roma that have had to relocate due to humanitarian conditions or political turmoil. She has organized sewing projects for Roma women and girls in camp Poderaccio in Florence, Italy.<[p>
Karen Graffeo has organized a performance art collective that includes emerging artists, professional artists and students. Her performance work received 2 fellowships from the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans in 1993 and in 1989.
