This autumn, San Francisco-based British artist Richard T. Walker is showing in two concurrent solo exhibitions at Carroll / Fletcher, London and àngels barcelona.
At Carroll / Fletcher, everything failing to become something furthers the artist's ongoing research into the American West. Drawing on experimental sound-making and the combined legacies (and clichés) of land art and romanticism, Walker's latest work explores the relationship between sincerity and experience, feeling and understanding, music and language.
The exhibition features a recent body of work never before shown in the UK, including a two-channel video shot in Southwest Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. Lightboxes present rocks turning into mountains, while reproductions of etchings taken from a 19th century Alpine travelogue bear cut-out mountain tops rolling at the bottom of the frames in which they are displayed.
The video the predicament of always (as it is) (2014) begins with Walker in the pose of the...Rückenfigur, a solitary presence seen from behind, amid deserted expanses. Clad in his signature red t-shirt, the artist sits en plein air in various natural locales while a recorded soundtrack of his own voice plays, as if he was attempting to converse with the awe-inspiring—but frustratingly mute—nature around him.
Throughout the piece, Walker films a series of static instruments placed within multiple landscapes and proceeds to activate each one by throwing a rock at it from outside the frame. The modest, verging-on-pathetic gesture has an existentialist quality: motivated by the vital urge to fully commune with one's environment, it sharply highlights the virtual impossibility thereof.
At àngels barcelona, in accordance with things is Richard T. Walker's third solo exhibition.
Curated by David Armengol
It's a matter of scale. Each stone is a potential mountain, as suggested by French sociologist Roger Caillois in his 1966 essay "Stones." In this text, he discusses his fascination with the world of minerals. It is a work of scientific contemplation, a fabulous and passionate meditation that leads you to understand that each stone is an ancestral, pre-civilized and authentic natural cosmogony.
If we think about the relationship between distance and proximity when confronted with the sublime landscape that Walker activates through his actions on the natural environment, we have a physical and mental analysis of the territory as observed by Caillois. In both cases, the landscape of stones becomes a particular universe; in both cases, the usual relationship of the individual with nature fades in favour of a more introspective, even mystical connection. In short, an activation of the scenery in Walker's work always has to do with the emotional charge of music.
In this sense, this exhibition revises the landscape of the American West as typified by the simple and magnificent prominence of the stone. It is an exercise of correlation between video, photography, sculpture and sound works in which the perception of wilderness—or, at least, of that which is not domesticated—depends on the multiple functions and symbols that Walker gives to the stone, which sometimes functions as a mere object, sometimes as a performative medium, and sometimes as a whole landscape in itself.
Richard T. Walker (b. 1977, Shrewsbury, UK) is based in San Francisco. He holds a BA in Fine Art from Bath Spa University College (1999) and an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, London (2005).
Entrada actualizada el el 23 sep de 2015
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