From May 16 through July 6, 2019, Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present new work by Richard T. Walker, continuing the artist’s exploration of the intersections of landscape, photography, video and sculpture. The exhibition includes installations and works on paper that incorporate etchings, screen prints, found and man-made rocks, branches, neon, and a full-sized trampoline. This will be Walker’s first solo show at Fraenkel Gallery’s 49 Geary Street location, following exhibitions at FraenkelLAB in 2016 and 2017.
In outside repetition, 2018, Walker jumps on a trampoline set in a field of sagebrush, and reaches as if to touch the peak of the mountain in the distance, never quite reaching it. The video installation, which is projected onto the trampoline itself, explores the way meaning is constructed from nature, referencing the Romantic tradition of artists such as Caspar David Friedrich and self-questioning Walker’s own earnest enactment of that tradition. In an acquiescence of meaning, 2018, an image of Mount Shasta is split into two parts that are joined together by a photograph of a long, thin, pink cloud, “a hyphen-like connector,” as Walker writes about the piece.
“I was thinking about how images relate to language, how components of an image are brought together to create visual meaning. Just as words within a sentence juggle for meaning to expose the fluidity of one’s perceived truth, I want to doubt landscape, but also remain true to the awe and fascination that it evokes.”
Richard T. Walker
