The Gulf Stream (After Winslow Homer) (work of art)

Recent works by Waddell have confronted notions of history and American colonialism and their continual scars, particularly in regard to members of the African and Caribbean diasporas. Frequently the artist employs imagery chosen for its symbolic nature: clipper ships, small boats, figures in 19th century dress or represented as Southern debutantes, and water, among others. Singed into Waddell’s supporting materials, these representations bring to mind turbulent episodes in American (or elsewhere) history: the slave trade and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s are prime in the artist’s oeuvre. Waddell has confirmed that our own turbulent times, as we face an uncertain future filled with shifting social, political and artistic foundations, have caused her anxiety. As a result, she’s sought answers from other unsettled/unsettling times in the past, focusing her attentions, in particular, on the late Nineteenth Century. By emulating the works of artists from that time period, Waddell finds a new beginning, a new start, a clearer path to proceed through these unknown times. She is able to become, in her words, “an amalgamation of the 19th century naturalist, the archivist, the social documentarian, the architect and political scientist. This allows me to make images that are not only re-constructions, but re-visions of sites that highlight my interest in the relationship between space, light, water and the construction of ideals.” For this work, Waddell takes her inspiration from a beloved masterpiece in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art: The Gulf Stream by American master Winslow Homer. With this work, Waddell notes, she is making an “effort to appropriate the power invested in portraiture, cultural leitmotifs and the naturalistic vista. Each provides a fitting context for me to critique the contradictions and misunderstandings of culture and history that remain relevant.” The artist has not elaborated on her choices of Homer and Manet as inspirations of her own images, but her erasure of both figures is telling. While many of her earlier works address issues of race in a more overt way, Waddell indirectly does so here by removing Homer’s figure entirely. The viewer’s eye is thus drawn to the blank void of the floor of the boat, acknowledging a physical absence that reminds us of the historical neglect of African or African Americans.