Richard T. Walker
I want to want you
like I wanted to want you
September 20 – October 25, 2008
Opening Reception:
September 20, 6-9 pm
David Cunningham Projects
San Francisco, CA 94103
http://www.davidcunninghamprojects.com
DCP (David Cunningham Projects) is pleased to announce “I want to want you like I wanted to want you” – a solo exhibition of new and recent work by Bay Area based artist Richard T. Walker. The exhibition includes video installation, digital prints, collage, text, and live performance.
Richard T. Walker’s new works in this exhibition are the continuation of an evolving investigation into the natural landscape and its use as a contextual tool to mobilize thoughts and self-reflection. With strong nods towards the European and American Romantic periods, Walker uses spoken dialogue, music and performance to facilitate engagement and analysis that is both contemplative and active. The work questions how we perceive nature as well as how we imagine nature perceiving us. This creates a continual dialogue that challenges our personal and general perceived notions of Landscape and Nature encouraging us to ask questions about how we belong within the contemporary environment and subsequently within our selves and our society.
Internal landscapes of thought and contemplation are given equal reign alongside differing manifestations of physical, nature-based beauty in an attempt to create empathy and understanding towards an idea of sincerity that is true to itself but is also objective and critical. Walker applies this same method of critique with regard to sentimentality where he consciously uses a creative language that borders on the sentimental but through various means, such as a subtle use of humour and context, pulls the work back into ‘safe’ territory, enabling us to simultaneously experience sentimentality whilst at the same time allowing us the space to reflect on it objectively.
By remaining faithful to a conventional use of verbal, visual and cultural language whilst also exposing the mechanics of their affect, the work allows for a unique ambiguity to occur that loosens interpretation and creates new meaning.
The central piece in the exhibition “what am we/you/I waiting for?” finds artist and singer/songwriter Will Oldham singing to the landscape in a lament devoted to intense Sublime experiences promised in the 18th century by writers such as Emmanuelle Kant and Edmund Burke but yet to be delivered. As in most of Walker’s work there is continual paralleling between an attempt to attain an understanding of (and the consequential unity with) nature and a forever quest for the ‘perfect’ relationship, (be this to ourselves, a lover or a friend), both of which are rarely achieved.
Richard T. Walker lives and works in San Francisco. He earned his MA from Goldsmiths College, London. His work has been presented in numerous exhibitions, screenings and performances Europe, Japan, China and the USA. He is the recipient of a fellowship from Kala Art Institute in Berkeley California and is currently an affiliate artist at Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito California. He is represented by Galeria dels Angels in Barcelona and Elisa Platteau in Brussels. This is his first exhibition with DCP.
For more information/ images please contact
info@davidcunninghamprojects.com | tel:- 415.341.1538 | http://www.davidcunninghamprojects.com
David Cunningham Projects
1928 Folsom Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
Phone: 415.341.1538
Fax: 415.341.1758
Hours: Thursday thru Saturday, Noon – 6pm (and by appointment)
