13 JANUARY TO 4 MARCH 2012

Douglas Walker:
Other Worlds

Opening Reception
Thursday 12 January at 8 pm

Curated by Peter Dykhuis and Corinna Ghaznavi

Organized by the Dalhousie Art Gallery in partnership with the Robert McLaughlin Gallery and the Kelowna Art Gallery.

Douglas Walker’s mostly monochromatic blue paintings on paper from the past decade are executed in a manner that pays homage both to historical fine art illustration and the graphic production strategies found in ‘outsider art’ and tattoo culture. For the past few years Walker’s imagery has revolved around three motifs: fantastical, other-worldly landscapes with mutant, modernist architectural structures; portraits of mid-20th Century women in which, for example, garments and hair morph into plant-like image-fields; and sinewy floral tendrils that parallel graphic flourishes, also from another century. All images and surfaces are finished in a top-coat of Walker’s invention that simulates crackled 18th Century Delft-blue ceramic glazing—which itself quotes the Chinese porcelain that was highly valued by the colonial Dutch traders. These paintings are Walker’s visitations to other places—perhaps real, perhaps imagined—where exotic graphic figures, human and otherwise, float in science fiction-like fields and atmospheres.

Walker has created new works for Other Worlds that synthesize pictorial components of his previous work into single images which are filled in with obsessively rendered references to cellular structures and organic matter. And Walker has significantly increased the size of these works. Indeed, the first installation of Other Worlds, which occurred this past Fall at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario, featured a nearly full-scale image of a sperm whale flanked on one side by a moon-like celestial body and on the other by an androgynous mask-like human, and occupied an entire 77’ long wall.

Alongside the work installed at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, this exhibition will present five new pieces that Walker has produced specifically for the Dalhousie Art Gallery: a modernist office building in a landscape, a suspension bridge, a large wave, a tree, and a human body laid out horizontally in a tomb-like structure. These works allude to transitory life forms, energy fields and natural forces in states of flux that are juxtaposed with engineered constructions which penetrate the sky or connect opposite shores over dangerous waters. Remaining poetically unfixed in specific meaning, Walker’s images appear to be assuredly rooted in an experience of earth that we collectively know. Yet there are too many little slippages, distortions and embellishments within the images to make us feel certain whether what we are looking at is from this world—or another.

http://www.douglaswalker.ca/