The Forks, 98/24. 2024, subscribed "The Grid", 32" x 38", mixed media work on plywood

The Forks is the final work in both the overhead view and Railway Lands sequences. The first overhead view works were done in Montreal c. 1989 and Railway Lands began when I was an artist in residence at Struts Artist Run in Sackville, New Brunswick in 1998. The picture represents the sacred place they call the Forks in Winnipeg. The place is called Niizhoziibean in Ojibwe. It means the two rivers. I chose this place for the last Railway Lands work, because a railway line runs through it. 

Eric Walker CV

 

 

 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kj3RnOOKs5_xOte6ql6OEicsAhxCc4il/view?usp=sharing

Events in the Tunnel, 2022, experimental video, 9:58, co-directed with Penny McCann

https://vimeo.com/862123490?share=copy

Life in the Tunnel

Events in the Tunnel, is an experimental representation of Canada’s relationship with its receding modernist colonial past. Based metaphorically on Gordon Lightfoot’s poetic Canadian Railroad Trilogy, Events in the Tunnel presents an absurdist retelling of Canada’s white colonial cultural history as defined, like Lightfoot’s great metaphor by a cross country train trip.

Embedded in the trope we witness familiar 19th and 20th Century paradigms of conformity and the expansion of white middle class consciousness represented by images of travel and amusement and moments that define Canadian colonial cultural history, particularly the dramatized struggles of our great 20th Century Canadian painter Tom Thomson.

Constructed from 8, Super8 and 16 mm. vintage artist films and found amateur footage, Events in the Tunnel is a post-colonial journey through colonized space and time. 

Events in the Tunnel was most recently shown at Fisura in Mexico City

Saint Lambert Leymoine and Southwark, and The Cut and the Arm on display at Gallery Sivarulrasa, Almonte, Ontario 2021

 

Promotion Engine Wow, 2004, 75 x 135 cms, private collection Ottawa

The Cut and the Arm, 1978 (2019) 83 x 122 cms mixed media construction on plywood

The Cut and the Arm, 1978 is based of an aerial view from the City of Halifax Archives and shows west end Halifax from the Armdale railway cut and the Northwest Arm to the roundhouse in Rockingham, circa 1978. Because of family breakdown I spent the first year of my life living next to the ocean in my Sang Mêlés Acadien homeland, Tus'ket Wedge in Yarmouth Co., Nova Scotia. Returning to Halifax the family lived in a dilapidated Victorian, cold-water flat off Windsor Street. In 1966 we moved to the west end into a new world of new things - streets, houses, schools, parks, shopping malls, all new and clean with smooth unbroken pavement for as far as the eye could see. Nothing can touch the perfection of this place on a quiet Sunday in high summer when all was so still the chirping of grasshoppers drifted over the hot paved parking lots and I was drawn to the historic train line behind Simpson-Sears to wait for trains. In contrast to everything around me the rail line was old, covered in oil and the margins overgrown with grass. The engineers knew this was a playground for children like me, particularly Chebucto Road Bridge so they sounded their horns from a great distance in the railway cut to warn us. Hearing the high pitched glassy sounding chime tooting and bending in the fluctuating winds we stepped away from the tracks and waited in the long grass for the train to pass, usually a modest double hitch Dayliner on the way to Yarmouth, or a long passenger train bound for Montréal. Before I could understand what sacred meant I knew this place was somehow sacred and eternal and that I was just a passing shadow over the pristine grey pavement on a quiet summer day.

The Ice and Snow in Nova Scotia, February 2015 (2015) 60 x 80 cms, collection, the City of Ottawa

The work is based on a satellite image of the Maritimes showing unprecedented ice and snow. The work is a kind of memento mori for my brother Gerard, who died in Truro in February 2015.