Hood Museum of Art

Tangled Emotions by Paige Beede

We are all held down by many things in our life that make our lives more difficult; and those things act as obstacles in our journey toward reaching a goal. Most of the time we are able to find a way to over come these obstacles. However, sometimes the force is so strong that you are trapped. Allison Saar constructed a sculpture physically and emotionally responding to this predicament: Caché. Saar is known for her sculptures reflecting on historical struggle based on her heritage as an African American.

A human-sized, wooden carving of a woman, incrusted with nailed rusting sheets of steel, lay in a fetal position on the floor in the middle of a large room in the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. The rusted color is a tone resembling Saar’s African American skin. These sheets are indented all over Caché’s body making the skin look wrinkled. Maybe Saar wanted to show age or distress in her sculpture. Even though the skin was made of steel Saar was able to capture a sort vulnerably through the fact that the color of the steel represented nudity.

The most moving part of this entire piece was the hair on her head. Made of black-painted metal wire, her hair pulls away from her head, weaving into a large ball. Majorly resembling an enormous rubber band ball, her knotted hair acts as the obstacle force.

When someone’s hair is knotted the only way to get it untangled is to use a brush or some other tool that will break through the gnarl, but when the knot is so large the idea of untangling it is unconceivable. The way the woman in the sculpture is positioned indicates Saar’s efforts to illustrate how she’s given up on her attempt to accomplish whatever goal she was aiming for. Caché lies there looking naked and vulnerable, allowing Saar to capture in her audience the feeling of being trapped in one’s skin given the metal sheets nailed onto her body.

Saar has conceived a visually simple piece that is emotionally relatable to a large group of people, the feeling that there is nothing to live for anymore.  She portrays this emotion through an everyday problem: tangled hair. Although, she has created a sense of loss of dignity resulted from this everyday problem that would seems inconceivably detrimental. Most people fuss over their hair and how it looks and how it feels to the touch because they are worried about their appearance. Saar, however, uses this part of the body as a metaphor for how tangled and messy and knotted obstacles can seem in a moment like the world is ending. As a whole, Allison Saar is able to draw out many different emotional responses from her audience, given she has created a piece of art that is relatable and meaningful making it most desirable to her viewers.