Kenneth Walker's Last Christmas at Home

My father Kenneth Walker at home for Christmas, December 28, 2009, 6834 Cook Avenue, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Acceptance and Rejection as an Artist, 2015, shredded paper

 

For the first twenty years of my practice I saved all the acceptance and rejection letters I received from the various granting agencies. I had the idea the documentation would be interesting. One day I shredded all the letters and this was the result. Now there are no more acceptance or rejection letters. It all comes through the email.

The Winnipeg Airport in 2006 (2007) collection Global Affairs Canada

My Canadian Forces Artist Program stills on Flickr

https://www.flickr.com/photos/132785798@N03/

I've put up all my CFAP pix on Flickr. The sets begin at CFB Halifax/Stadaconna, September 7, they observe life on board HMCS Halifax and on sea exercises, then our arrival at Norfolk, Virginia, September 17, 2015. This document is a prelude to the high def immersive vid I will produce over the next year and a half.

The Shattered House, American Linoleum Version, 2015

This is the sixth large version of the Shattered House. The Shattered Houses are based on a photograph of a smashed and distorted, but still standing house on Duffus Street in the aftermath of the 1917 Halifax explosion and come out of my Disaster Ship series last shown at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in 1998. Penny found this particular linoleum on Amazon. The significance of American linoleum as the 100th anniversary of the explosion nears struck me as a workable and appropriate metaphor in the evolving series.

To Be Heard With the Eye Only and Other Tales of Modernism, Emily Falvey, 2002, Part 1

Eric's note: this is Emily's catalogue essay for my Tokyo show at the Canadian Embassy in 2002. It's a brilliant, poetic, and insightful look into art practice. Well worth reading.


As you read these words there is a voice inside your head that does not make a sound. You hear nothing, but there is a tone nonetheless. And this tone is nothing but a particular, resonant feature in an immense and inaudible landscape of “sounds” that will follow you throughout your life, sonorities in the deaf and colours in the blind.

Such resonance constitutes one of the most profound ironies of the modern visual arts, a palpitation that ‘strikes the eye’ and makes it resonate, what Pascal Quingard once playfully referred to as l’oreille de l’oeil (the ear of / from the eye). It reminds us that in the tale of Narcissus (art for art’s sake) there is also an echo, that the retinal also has a moment of resonance, a refrain that Duchamp eloquently intoned with his Rotoreliefs, optical illusions that must be played like records. Modern art is above all its own undoing.

It was at the pitch of this irony that, during a twenty-year, highly romanticized period at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (1967-1987), some of eastern Canada’s most resonant artwork was produced. It is work that retro-spection would like to cast as either neo-avant-garde or proto-postmodern, but which might be better described as a certain kind of modern echo. It was near the end of its overture that Ottawa based artist, Eric Walker, devised his aesthetic strategy, and it is within the cadence of its ironic and dissipated modernism that his work continues to resound.

Walker’s practice has for many years been tied discursively to what should be by now an anachronistic discord. Characterized perceptively on the one hand as “icons of a modern world,” his painted constructions, which he assembles from memory, local histories and detritus found in the streets, are derided almost paranoically on the other as “faux folk art.” Although we tend today to pay lip-service to alternative histories - exalting them as inverted, deconstructed, non-linear and marginal - our eyes continue to roll at the slightest indication of more ‘credulous,’ frequently spoken narrative types - like folklore for instance. You can hear the eyes rolling. Today we are ficto-critical; today the artist is an ethnographer.

On that note, one must not overlook certain structuralist leanings that tend to go in the other direction, defining Walker’s work in terms of semiotics. It seems a little unfortunate, however, to impound his multifaceted constructions at the “switching station” of discursive meanings, thus grounding them forcibly in written or textually based concepts of language. And while Walker’s work often involves textual insertions, they function more as compositional markers than discursive texts - simple descriptions within a more diverse articulation of movement and retrospection. Walker’s recent series of locomotives are, for instance, closer to enunciations than texts, mnemonic rather than linear documents. This is all the more evident given their status as inventions of hazard, which brings them closer to semiotisation than semiotics: the kind of play, both musical and rhythmic, that one might find animating a composition or resonating throughout an arrangement.

Moncton CN Buildings with the Ocean Limited Passing Dorchester at Night, c.1995, private collection Ottawa