Melanie Walker | Online Artist Talk – Song For My Father

We are excited to be showcasing Song for my Father: A Daughter’s (W)Reckoning in our Atelier Gallery at the Griffin in Winchester.

We want to bring this beautiful exhibition to you, and celebrate this meaningful series with an online artist talk with Melanie Walker in the Griffin Zoom Room. Join us on August 25th at 7pm Eastern Time to hear Melanie Walker discuss her work, creativity and this beautiful memento honoring her Father.

About the exhibition Song for my Father: A Daughter’s (W)Reckoning

© Melanie Walker, “Homage to Talbot”

Over the last 21 years I have had the privilege of organizing, inventorying and placing my father’s archive. Todd Walker was a pioneering photographic artist who began self-publishing artist books in 1965, was at the leading edge of historical photographic processes in the 1960’s and began printing his photographs as ink on paper (which is now how most images are printed) in 1970. In 1981 he began to explore digital photography long before photoshop existed, teaching himself machine language. He was my mentor, role model and encouraged me to dance at the edges of photography, just outside of my comfort zone.

These images have been in the making for over 50 years, representing a posthumous collaboration with my father and an investigation of the materiality and impermanence of the photographic object. The film emulsion has been subjected to fluctuations in temperature and moisture now barely clinging to the base it’s transparent substrate.

© Melanie Walker, “627”

Before my father left commercial photography in 1970 to become an artist and professor, he was a highly successful free-lance advertising photographer in Los Angeles and worked for many notable clients. Frequently a child model in these constructed photographic ‘realities’, I grew up with a healthy skepticism of the images utilized in advertising. My father was at moral odds with advertising work, knowing that the images he was making were to be used for corporate gain and lies. Many of these early commercial negatives done in a rush, were nothing that he was particularly proud of and were not cared for properly. The images I include in this exhibition are some of what I have discovered in my detective work coming to terms with the loss of my father. These distressed negatives bear witness to the interaction of time, heat, and moisture as they transform into resemblances of reality. They serve as a critique of the marketing construct that was named The American Dream and bear witness to a history reconsidered

About Melanie Walker –

Melanie Walker has been a practicing artist for over 50 years. Her expertise is in the area of alternative photographic processes, digital and mixed media as well as large scale immersive photographic installations as well as public art. She attended San Francisco State University for a Bachelor’s degree in Art and Florida State University for an MFA. She has received a number of awards including an NEA Visual Arts Fellowship, Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship, Polaroid Materials Grants and an Aaron Siskind Award. She has  taught at a number of universities including San Francisco State University, SUNY Albany, Alfred University and the University of Kentucky, Lexington. She currently teaches in the Media Arts Area at the University of Colorado Boulder and has work in over 100 collections including LACMA, Center fro Creative Photography, Princeton Art Museum and San Francisco Museum of Art.

• When registering for this Artist Talk, we will ask you to register through Zoom for your online safety and the safety of others. You will receive a personalized Zoom link once you have registered for the meeting. That Zoom link will be how you access the talk. Not our issued ticket information.