Sarah Walker
Serene Velocity, 2001, acrylic on paper mounted on panel, 51" x 45", Lent by the Artist
This last year I have been exploring the similarities between mental space and cyberspace. Virtual, largely abstract, and still under construction, both kinds of space seem to behave as extensions of one another. I am curious about what the visual unconscious of these spaces looks like, and what terms we use from other areas of life to make symbolic sense of our experiences there. These questions challenge how I deal with space, time, and the possibilities of abstract painting in my current work. Recently I have become interested in the notion of the spiraculum aeternetatus, originally a medieval alchemical term meaning "the air hole through which eternity wafts into the terrestrial world." This bridge between two spatial realms also presents itself in archetypal psychology where it refers to the meeting place between the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. A spiraculum seems to exist between the collective unconscious and cyberspace. I am in the process of exploring the structure of this aperture and how, in turn, it can be represented visually.
—Sarah Walker
Sarah Walker is a painter who creates abstract allegories for the intricacies and increasing complexities of the twenty-first century information environment. She has developed a non-objective formal vocabulary that relies not on twentieth-century art historical precedents (the grid, the body, and the structures of the subconscious mind), but on new conceptions of space, pattern, and form that emanate from contemporary science, psychology, and philosophy. Her visual worlds-in-flux, where space, size, scale, position, and point of view lurch alarmingly, derive from her understandings of how disciplines like computer science, physics, astronomy, mathematics, neuroscience, and genetics increasingly model the underlying structures of our identities, our bodies, and our universe—on both microscopic and cosmological levels. While pioneering new territory for painting, though, Walker has not abandoned more traditional notions of visual eloquence based on color, line, shape, and composition. She is a masterful painter immersed in a brave new world of cyber-experience, where biology and technology couple.
—Nick Capasso
Curator
Please join the artist for an informal gallery talk on Saturday, August 11 at 3pm.
previous artist | next artist
