2004

Wish-Whish-Whisk

Ellen Gallagher

American, born 1965

Ellen Gallagher’s work confronts issues of racial identity by transforming racist imagery, through multiplication and disjunction, into elegant abstract elements. Wish-Whish-Whisk (2004), a six-part work on paper, joins elements of two of the artist’s recent series. Ebony, a collection of mixed-media pieces, presents images taken from advertisements for wigs in mid-twentieth-century black culture magazines, such as Ebony and Black Star, that are multiplied many times and arranged in dense grids. In Watery Ecstatic, an ongoing series begun in 2001, Gallagher creates a mythical underworld peopled by African women and children, fossil fish, eels, and land masses—images that she carved with a scalpel into a thick paper surface.

Wish-Whish-Whisk extends the theme of a Black Atlantis, combining Gallagher’s archetypal “wig ladies” with images of sea life, specifically the eel—a mysterious, bottom-feeding fish that lives in the darkness of muddy waters. Asian tribes say that eels are the souls of the dead, while in parts of Europe it is believed that rubbing the skin with eel oil will cause a person to see ghosts or fairies.

Gallagher relates drawing with a knife to the art of scrimshaw, the delicate miniature carvings on whalebone made by sailors on shipboard. She also connects this technique to the disturbing trend among young women of inflicting pain on themselves by cutting their own skin, as well as to the long history of ritual and tribal practice of scarification in African culture.

Gallagher has said: “The key thing that links [the Ebony series with the Watery Ecstatic drawings] is the idea of disembodiment or invasion from the inside out, this kind of captivity.” She also points to the fact that “in water, all that is dead turns white.”