Richard T. Walker records his encounters with the American landscape in video, installation, text, photography and music, raising questions about the journey toward consciousness and our relationship to the natural world. Walker’s diaristic work nods naturally to 19th-Century Romanticism and the intensity of landscape conjured by Caspar David Friedrich or Frederic Church, while the American landscape’s representation on film—the way that nature can become a protagonist in a narrative—is an equally strong inspiration.

In the two-channel video installation outside of all things (2013), a film begins with the crescendo of a repetitive dissonant chord as the artist as moves through the desert with a large cutout image of a mountain peak strapped to his back. Reviewing the work in Frieze, Colin Perry writes: “As the sun starts to set, the soundtrack changes to a programmed drumbeat and, as a coda, he plays a thumping tune to the landscape on a keyboard and a battery–powered amplifier. This set-up is rigged to a couple of neon strips in the shape of the outlines of two mountaintops, which blink in time to the music: a disco for the wilderness. The scene seems inexplicable, redolent of some form of communion beyond verbal or textual cognition.”

About the artist:

Richard T. Walker (b. 1977, United Kingdom) has shown his work internationally in solo exhibitions at Spike Island, Bristol, UK; Carroll/Fletcher, London, UK; Franklin Art Works, Minneapolis, MN; and the Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA. Group exhibitions include The Text: First Notions and Findings at Fabra iCoats Center d'Art Contemporani, Barcelona, Spain; Autonomous Regions at the Guangdong Times Museum, Guandong, China; Stage Presence at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Big Picture, K21, Dusseldorf, Germany; The Art of Pop Video at the Museum fur Angewandte Kunst, Cologne, Germany; Embodying at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA; and Meditators at the National Museum, Warsaw. Walker lives and works in San Francisco.

-James Cohan Gallery

Image: © Richard T. Walker
Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery