Sarah Walker
Brooklyn, NY
Artist’s Statement
I intend these paintings to operate as tools for recalibrating perception. They present a concentrated arena in which to experience simultaneous, interwoven, contradictory spaces and states of being. In them I mirror the ecstasy and catastrophe knit into the impulse to have access to everything
Structures found within technology, the sciences, nature and architecture provide the internal organization and logic for my paintings. Through successive layers I inset intricate geometries within what seem to be sinking archipelagos and dissolving perspectival systems, which are themselves the residue left over from past layers. In this way spaces emerge, transform and then decay, always leaving a trace in the final painting. A self-imposed rule dictates that every layer remain partially visible, and to this end I use processes where all strata are interwoven through a series of cancellations and resurrections. Liquid paint of various consistencies is pooled into segmented areas and left to dry in cracking, crusted or crepuscular patterns. Other times it dries partially then I wipe it away to reveal the stratum underneath. Every layer is both obliterated and preserved multiple times.
I look for moments of intensity where the cross-communication of dissimilar patterns form a moiré effect on the mind that can lead to thinking visually in interpenetrating information fields- the main subject of my work.
Ultimately, my work offers an integrated set of visual terms for the experience of multiple and ever more permeable realities. How does the mind consolidate an image that combines both the physical and the virtual? How does it look to have the visual terms of both the material and non-material spaces coexist simultaneously? It is here in this nexus of physical and virtual space that I aim to build a set of terms for thinking and being.
Artist’s Links
artist’s website: www.sarahwalker.org
gallery links: http://www.pierogi2000.com/artists/sarah-walker/