Discipline: Visual Art – painting

Sarah Walker

Discipline: Visual Art – painting
Region: Brooklyn, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 2001

Sarah Walker

I intend these paintings to operate as tools for recalibrating perception. They present a concentrated arena in which to experience simultaneous, interwoven, contradictory spaces and states of being.
Dynamics of accumulation underpin my work; I filter in not out. By permitting actions, no matter how awkward, to remain they possibly generate their own redemption on a later layer. A generous leeway exists layer to layer for preservation so that each action casts its line of development forward into the painting’s future.
Structures of various kinds provide the internal organization and logic for my paintings. Through successive layers I inset intricate geometries within sinking archipelagos and dissolving perspectival systems, which are themselves the acrylic residue left over from past liquid layers. Spaces emerge, transform, then decay, always leaving a trace in the final painting.
Ultimately, my paintings offer visual terms for the experience of multiple and ever more permeable realities. How does the mind consolidate an image or object that combines the physical, personal, spatial and virtual? How does it look to have both material and non-material spaces operate simultaneously? I look for moments of intensity where the cross-communication of dissimilar patterns form a moiré effect in the mind that can lead to thinking visually in interpenetrating information fields- the main subject of my work.

Studios

Cheney

Sarah Walker worked in the Cheney studio.

Cheney Studio was given to MacDowell by Mrs. Benjamin P. Cheney and Mrs. Karl Kauffman. Like Barnard Studio, Cheney is a low, broadly massed bungalow. Sited on a steep westward slope, its porches are supported on wooden posts and fieldstone with lattices. Although it still retains its appealing character, the original design of the shingled building…

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