1994 - 1995
mixed media
21.5 x 24 x 19.25 in.

Traveling Root Store #2: Madame Ching Goes High Tech demonstrates Stout's skill in combining carefully selected objects to communicate effectively and deeply about her subjects. Appropriately, Stout began this piece with a nineteenth-century doctor's bag that she bought at a New Orleans flea market. That the world Stout has invented is not full of artifacts from another time and place, but from a still vital artistic and cultural present is proven by the central addition to this well-equipped suitcase of cures--a computer. Madame Ching travels with her computer so that she too can channel the spiritual at the speed of contemporary life, by accessing the spirits with a keystroke or calling up cures stored in the computer's prodigious memory. Though aided by high technology, Ching's root store is still dominated by the many vials, herbs, potions or pre-packaged remedies that keep her cures grounded in the actual rather than the virtual.

Traveling Root Store #2 contains not just any computer with a memory and storage capabilities. Its keyboard has been specially altered to meet the specific needs of Madam Ching. Erzulie and other deities can be reached with a single keystroke; or "past," "present," and "future" replace such keys as "tab," "control," or "shift." Stout ensures that even here she can access her ancestors as quickly as she can other spirits, with the "escape" key marked "1916." And in accord with her spiritual philosophy, a human face is drawn on the "enter" key to reinforce the role of individual belief and action in the conjuring process.

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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