Breach is the signature piece from Alison Saar’s body of work informed by the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, an epic inundation that affected over 630,000 people, some one-third of whom...
Breach is the signature piece from Alison Saar’s body of work informed by the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, an epic inundation that affected over 630,000 people, some one-third of whom were Blacks. Almost exactly ninety years before the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, the Great Mississippi River Flood similarly foregrounded socio-economic and other inequities between Blacks and whites. Breach has been described as “a virtual lexicon of Saar’s favored materials—wood, found objects, and...tin ceiling tiles, suggestive of ritual scarification. The life-size figure stands on a pallet-cum-raft with her punt pole at the ready....More than anything, [her] gravity-defying load speaks to the limits of human endurance. In this homage to strength, Saar intentionally makes connections between Atlas, Greek god of endurance, and the Senegalese women and children she encountered during a visit to Senegal in 2006. Essentially mobile agents of commerce, these African women and children routinely balance gravity-defying loads of calabashes and other market goods on their heads with the same grace and equanimity as the figure in Breach.” Because the figure’s pole in Breach reaches the “water”—in reality the floor where viewers stand—anyone standing on that same floor is implicated in the work’s narrative.
Saar’s protagonist has also been likened to Mark Twain’s Jim on the raft with Huck Finn, as well as to ancient Greek caryatids (figure-shaped pillars that literally bear the weight of temple entablatures). At the same time, Saar’s roughly carved wood figure evokes the intensity of early 20th-century German Expressionist sculpture, which in turn was heavily informed by contemporaneous and 19th-century African sculptures. Saar has spoken about the importance of German Expressionist carved wood figures to her own work.
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