Richard T. Walker @ Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Richard T. Walker
Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Through 6 July, 2019

RICHARD T. WALKER

an acquiescence of meaning, 2018

© Richard T. Walker, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Fraenkel Gallery presents 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 is Richard T. Walker’s first solo show at Fraenkel Gallery’s 49 Geary Street location, following exhibitions at FraenkelLAB in 2016 and 2017.

Working in vast, dramatic landscapes or in the studio, Richard T. Walker uses his own body to emphasize differences of scale and distance between human experience and the natural world. In outside repetition, 2018, Richard T. 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 Richard T. 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 Richard T. 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,” he continues. “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 (b. 1977, Shrewsbury, UK) lives and works in the Bay Area. His artwork and performances have been included in solo and group exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; The Contemporary Austin; Times Museum, Guangzhou, China; Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art; and Witte De With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, among other venues. His work is held in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Kadist Foundation, San Francisco and Paris, and Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (K21), Dusseldorf, among others. Richard T. Walker has been an Irvine Fellow at the Montalvo Art Center, and a resident at The Headlands Center for the Arts and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He received an Artadia Award in 2009.

FRAENKEL GALLERY
49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108
www.fraenkelgallery.com