Douglas Walker: Of Moon and Whale and Man
Douglas Walker Other Worlds 2011 Installation view / photo Michael Cullen, Trent Photographics
In his exhibition “Other Worlds,” Toronto painter Douglas Walker steps into some new territory. Over the past decade, Walker has worked through a series of large-format post-apocalyptic paintings that address ideas of postmodern malaise. More recently, he has honed his practice into the production of distinctive blue images that link paint, texture and biomorphic imagery into something of an alternate universe of evolving flora—new life forms on the other side of the end of history. At the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Walker now presents a monumental installation with flat, frontal images of a full moon, a whale and a face that broach the realm of a mystical symbolic order.
| |
|
Douglas Walker Other Worlds 2011 Detail / photo Michael Cullen, Trent Photographics |
This new work is a progress from landscape to cosmology that leans on a quasi-religious, temple-like integration of images into the architectural space of the gallery. Made in three panels with gridded sections of paintings on paper, and mounted on floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall canvas supports, the work carries the weight of the room into its sombre blue palette. From the implications of night sky, ocean depths and ghostly masking, there is a submersive aspect to the imagery, a pull towards an imaginative life lived in the dark. The buckled, glossy surface of the painted grid components reads like water and offers fleeting highlights as your eyes scan the installation. For all the impressionistic flux, however, the images are fixed and formal and sign-like, akin to the hieroglyphs of an Egyptian tomb; in Walker’s case, a planetary tomb seems more relevant. He has made a work where time comes measured in eons and contemporary painting is best seen in the light of cave painting.
| |
|
Douglas Walker Other Worlds 2011 Detail / photo Michael Cullen, Trent Photographics |
Subscribe to Canadian Art today and save 30% off the newstand price.
