Eric Walker: Here and Gone
March 26 to May 30 2004
Curators: Renee Baert in collaboration with Aoife MacNamara

Artist Talk with Eric Walker
Friday 23 April 2004 at 12 pm

Exhibition info>

As a child growing up in Halifax, Eric Walker spent much time at museums: the Citadel, the Nova Scotia Museum of History and Natural Science and the nascent Art Gallery of Nova Scotia—then in a powder magazine at the Citadel. His artwork is drawn from this experience.

Like the Lahore wonder house depicted in Rudyard Kipling's novel, Kim, Walker would ultimately like his works when taken together, through his various subject streams to parallel the Victorian notion of a great miscellany museum that in a modern context, by extension, functions within a  discourse surrounding material culture and memory.

"I work at edge of the contemporary art practice," Walker  affirms. "Because of the materiality of my work, with the nails exposed, so to speak, viewers are never afraid of my pictures, like they might be of painting with its mysterious technique and priest-like practitioners." My images don't intimidate, so people feel free to look in and around them are never feel condescended to."

Walker was heavily influenced in his youth  by Nova Scotian Folklorist Helen Creighton. A distinguished figure, Creighton achieved fame in the 1940s and 50s for collecting rapidly vanishing folk lore and music, which in turn influenced a whole generation of Nova Scotians to look at their own history and culture. "The center of the art world is wherever you happen to be," says Walker. Walker draws on the indexical nature of Creighton's work and in his own way creates catalogues, lists, and inventories, using her methodology as a guidepost.

A graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Walker moved from Nova Scotia in the late 80's to Montreal, then in 1991 to Ottawa. His works reflect his experience. His first body of work Notes from Popular History, was based on stories form Halifax Warden of the North by  Halifax historian and novelist Thomas Raddall. Notes was followed by a series of Nova Scotia landscapes, then a large group of marine subjects, Disaster Ships— roughly parallel with his City Pictures of Montreal and Ottawa and most recently Railway Lands, a multi themed body encompassing several evolving subject streams.

With a background in such medias as film, video, graphic design and drawing, Walker uses a range of discarded construction and industrial materials to create representational,  illusionistic mixed media "paintings" on plywood.

In contrast to his early more didactic and allegorical works in which people are prominent. His work since the late 80's focuses on industrial objects where people are only implied. Busses, doomed ocean liners, government buildings, container ships, views of the city from above and trains all come together to form Walker's modernist museum.