The title of Jake Walker’s new exhibition, Time Frame, puns on the potential of the picture frame to enclose and contain time. In this series, the viewer digs through gaps and transparencies to discover an archeology of surfaces. Sometimes a signature or line drawing is spontaneously etched into the final coat of paint – a reminder of the artist’s most recent contact with the surface. Walker’s ceramic frames carry their own sense of history, carefully revealing stages of the firing process. Their protrusions and appendages evoke instruments of antiquity and pieces of modernist pottery. They subvert their traditional function as window frames and become containers for the painted object, enclosing and charging it with energy. In an age when time is increasingly framed by the shallow flicker of a screen, Walker’s art makes us slow down and look back.
Walker received his MFA at Otago School of Fine Art in Dunedin in 1991. Recent solo exhibitions include Geyserland, Dutton Gallery, New York; Suggested Things, Hamish McKay, Wellington, 2016; Unemployment Works, Station, Melbourne, 2016; Sydney Contemporary with Gallery 9, 2015; The Town Belt, City Gallery, Wellington, 2014; Paintings Questions, Gallery 9, Sydney, 2013; Painting and Relief, Studio 12, Gertrude Contemporary, 2012. Select group exhibitions include 5 Perspectives, The Young, Wellington, 2014; Assembly, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne, 2014; Never-Never Land, Roslyn Oxley 9 in collaboration with Utopian Slumps, Sydney, 2014; Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2013. Walker’s work is held in the Wallace Arts Trust, Chartwell Collection (Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki), the Joyce Nissan collection, the Te Papa Tongarewa collection, as well as various private collections in New Zealand, Australia and internationally. Walker was a Gertrude Contemporary resident studio artist from 2011 to 2012. He lives and works in Featherston, New Zealand.
Press release courtesy Gallery 9.
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