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Posted on November 1, 2019

Nearly West
Walker Pickering
January 9 – March 1, 2020

Reception January 16, 2020, 7-8:30 PM
Barbara Diener gallery talk at 6:15 PM on January 16, 2020.

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Artist Statement
Walker Pickering writes about his project: “As a child, I was fortunate to spend time with my father while he lived in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. This instilled in me a great sense of adventure, where travel has been formative to my work, and caused me to seek out the exotic among the ordinary. My long-term project, Nearly West, is a journey through the land of my childhood, re-imagining places my ancestors lived and experienced.”

Statement by Russell Lord on Nearly West
Looking intensely is an important, but strangely underrated, practice in contemporary photography. As Laughlin reminds us, it is through the act of looking intensely that we can begin to understand ourselves and the world around us. When we are very young, we do almost nothing but look. Consequently, we learn at an incredible rate in the early stages of life. As we age, learning and recognition becomes habitual, and looking becomes a cursory process. We look, we think we know, and we move on.

Walker Pickering (born 1980) is still paying very close attention to the things around him, and in his body of work, Nearly West, he draws our attention to various compelling remnants of human history: a children’s slide in a forest, a solar powered American flag light, building signage, motels, and empty parking lots. In some cases, Pickering presents a distant past (the slide is rusting and the flag light faded) in others, however, it appears that we have stumbled upon a recently—and suddenly—vacated space. All of these pictures embody a haunting and surreal sense of place and history, emphasizing the strangeness of the worlds that we create, populate, and then leave behind. Clarence John Laughlin often went out of his way to manipulate, distort, double, and stretch his subjects in order to impart a kind of psychic energy, to stress the surreal. Pickering, whose images are straight—if beautiful—transcripts of actual places, reminds us that the world is often strange enough as it is.

Russell Lord
Freeman Family Curator of Photographs
New Orleans Museum of Art

Bio
Walker Pickering (born 1980, Odessa, Texas, USA) is an American artist and photographer. Pickering was a 2018 finalist for the Prix HSBC pour la Photography, and winner of the 2013 Clarence John Laughlin Award. His work is widely exhibited both in the US and abroad, and included in private and public collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Since 2014 he has been an Assistant Professor at the University of Nebraska, and he lives and works in Lincoln, NE and New York, NY.

 

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Floor Plan

Amy Rindskopf's Terra Novus

At the market, I pick each one up, pulled in by the shapes as they sit together, waiting. I feel its heft in my hand, enjoy the textures of the skin or peel, and begin to look closer and closer. The patterns on each individual surface marks them as distinct. I push further still, discovering territory unseen by the casual observer, a new land. I am like a satellite orbiting a distant planet, taking the first-ever images of this newly envisioned place.

This project started as an homage to Edward Weston’s Pepper No. 30 (I am, ironically, allergic to peppers). As I looked for my subject matter at the market, I found that I wasn’t drawn to just one single fruit or vegetable. There were so many choices, appealing to both hand and eye. I decided to print in black and white to help make the images visually more about the shapes, and not about guessing which fruit is smoothest, which vegetable is greenest.

Artistic Purpose/Intent

Artistic Purpose/Intent

Tricia Gahagan

 

Photography has been paramount in my personal path of healing from disease and

connecting with consciousness. The intention of my work is to overcome the limits of the

mind and engage the spirit. Like a Zen koan, my images are paradoxes hidden in plain

sight. They are intended to be sat with meditatively, eventually revealing greater truths

about the world and about one’s self.

 

John Chervinsky’s photography is a testament to pensive work without simple answers;

it connects by encouraging discovery and altering perspectives. I see this scholarship

as a potential to continue his legacy and evolve the boundaries of how photography can

explore the human condition.

 

Growing my artistic skill and voice as an emerging photographer is critical, I see this as

a rare opportunity to strengthen my foundation and transition towards an established

and influential future. I am thirsty to engage viewers and provide a transformative

experience through my work. I have been honing my current project and building a plan

for its complete execution. The incredible Griffin community of mentors and the

generous funds would be instrumental for its development. I deeply recognize the

hallmark moment this could be for the introduction of the work. Thank you for providing

this incredible opportunity for budding visions and artists that know they have something

greater to share with the world.

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