1994 - 1995
mixed media
23.5 x 13 x 5.75 in.
Collection of the Artist

In Who's Hoodooin' Who (The Fourth Pentacle of Venus), the main narrative, hand printed carefully in gold ink on a black panel, chronicles the request Stout made of Roy Ferdinand, a New Orleans rootworker and folk artist, to create a mojo for her friend. "Will you make a good luck charm for my friend? He really wanted a mojo to make me fall in love with him, but what would I look like paying somebody to put something on me?..." Ferdinand gives the charm to Stout for her friend, but Stout keeps it instead, as Ferdinand guessed she would. The witty title of this piece plays with this experience and the mysterious ways conjuring can work: if Stout kept the charm instead of giving it away, then who was casting a spell on whom to gain a hold of love?

Who's Hoodooin' Who clearly shows how such charms function for Stout. Linked to an anecdotal text, the seal provides us a window onto her life and her interactions with actual healers and their remedies. That Stout's intention is playful and ironic rather than serious is evident in more than her words--it is embodied in her transformation of the mojo into a monument. The gilded frame may make the seal museum-worthy, yet its intentional asymmetry with its missing part destabilizes its grandeur and keeps it rooted in a world where things are not always what they seem or what people want them to be.

From M. Berns, Dear Robert, I'll See You at the Crossroads: A Project by Renée Stout, University Art Museum, UCSB, 1995.

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