7:44 minutes
let this be us is a single-channel video by Richard T. Walker featuring the artist himself roaming around the wilderness of a deserted landscape, sporadically humming a melody, strumming a guitar, or playing a few notes on a keyboard. As he traverses between striking locations we see him carrying large photographic prints of the same landscape that he is treading, which he then rests onto tripods so that the horizon in the photograph seamlessly matches that of the real landscape. As we hear the music, Walker comes in and out of view, dissipating into the landscape as his body becomes invisible, hidden behind the photographic prints. The sublime mountain peaks, as the artist explains, only exist in the distance, and our experience of them is different when we are up-close. In that sense they are unattainable, and always in the distance… a beautiful analogy of human longing and desire.
Richard T. Walker seeks out sublime landscapes, devoid of human intervention—often with vast skies punctuated by mountains—and transforms them into intimate settings to compose performative videos, with layered soundtracks. The videos are often presented with sculptures, instruments and images, that collectively speak (or sing) of the relationship between a single human life and the limitless expanse of the natural world. Originally from the U.K., Walker moved to California in 2007, drawn by the striking landscape of American West. Akin to 18th century Romantic figures such as Caspar David Friedrich, for Walker the sublime landscape is an arena in which he can explore strong human emotions and existential ideas: from the perception of the self and others, through to human solitude and our relationship to nature.
Untitled (Perfect Lovers + 1) by Cerith Wyn Evans takes as its starting point Felix Gonzales-Torres’s seminal work Untitled (Perfect Lovers) , in which two clocks were synchronized and left to run without interference, the implication being that one would stop before the other...
Untitled is a black-and-white photograph of a wave just before it breaks as seen from the distance of an overlook...
Xaviera Simmons often employs her own body and collected materials in the service of her photographs and performances...
Sarcastically titled to call attention to the problematic notions underlying colonialism, this photograph shows hundreds of Native Malaysians seated quietly behind one of their colonial oppressors...
“BC/AD” (Before Cancer, After Diagnoses) is a video of photographs of the artist’s face dating from early childhood to the month before he died, accompanied by the last diary entries he wrote from April 2004 to July 2005 (entitled “50 Reasons for Getting Out of Bed”), from the period from when he lost his voice, thinking he had laryngitis, through the moment he was diagnosed with lung cancer and the subsequent treatment that was ultimately, ineffective...
Wagon Wheel is a work with a fundamental dynamism that derives both from the rotating movement of the elements suspended on poles and the kicking of the legs of the figure...
The photograph Exquisite Eco Living is part of a larger series titled Executive Properties in which he digitally manipulated the images to insert iconic buildings of Kuala Lumpur in the view of derelict spaces also found in the city...
In Made In Heaven , we are face to face with a sculptural apparition, a divine visitation in the artist’s studio...
In Eniko Mihalik (2012), the camera captures a glimpse of the eponymous Hungarian model as seen through a rearview mirror...
The print Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam (2010) features an Asian Buddhist monk and an American Navy Solider on board the Mercy ship –one of the two dedicated hospital ships of the United States Navy– sitting upright in their chairs and adopting the same posture...
To explore the boundaries between artwork and audience, Gimhongsok created a series of sculptural performances in which a person wearing an animal costume poses in the gallery...
Ponderosa Pine IV belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that live in Northern California...