calendario eventi  :: 

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23/9/2015

Two exhibition

Carroll / Fletcher, London

Richard T. Walker everything failing to become something
Sep 25 - Nov 14, 2015

Carroll / Fletcher is pleased to announce a new solo exhibition by San Francisco-based British artist Richard T. Walker. everything failing to become something furthers the artist's ongoing research into the American West. Drawing on experimental sound-making and the combined legacies (and clichés) of land art and romanticism, Walker's work explores the relationship between sincerity and experience, feeling and understanding, music and language.

The exhibition will feature a recent body of work never shown in the UK before, including a two-channel video shot in Southwest Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. Lightboxes present rocks turning into mountains, while reproductions of etchings, taken from a 19th century Alpine travelogue, bear cut-out mountain tops rolling at the bottom of the frames in which they are displayed. Formed from Casiotone keyboards, Walker's sculptural neon installations mimic the jagged outlines of the rocks placed on the works' keys. These create a drone-like sound, anticipating the hum of the empty spaces featured in his new video work.

Walker's musical influences range from Brian Eno and La Monte Young to 80s and 90s alternative and indie rock bands Spacemen 3, Sebadoh, Dinosaur Jr and Pavement, which deeply affected him during his childhood in Shropshire, on the rural border of England and Wales. Critical reflections on the oeuvre of iconic American photographer Ansel Adams and Hudson River School landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church have also played a key role in shaping Walker's practice.

The video the predicament of always (as it is) (2014) was partly shot near Marfa, Texas, a high site of minimalism, closely associated with Donald Judd. It begins with Walker in the pose of the Rückenfigur, a solitary presence seen from behind, amid deserted expanses. Clad in his signature red t-shirt, the artist sits en plein air in various natural locales while a recorded soundtrack of his own voice plays, as if he was attempting to converse with the awe-inspiring - but frustratingly mute - nature around him.

Throughout the piece, Walker films a series of static instruments placed within multiple landscapes and proceeds to activate each one by throwing a rock at it from outside the frame. The modest, verging-on-pathetic gesture has an existentialist quality: motivated by the vital urge to fully commune with one's environment, it sharply highlights the virtual impossibility thereof.

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Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme: Unforgiving Years: The Incidental Insurgents, Part 2
Sep 25 - Oct 24, 2015

Following Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme's critical acclaim at the 12th Sharjah Biennial (2015), Carroll / Fletcher brings the second chapter of their ambitious research-based project The Incidental Insurgents (2012-2015) to London. The multi-media installation unfolds as a three-part narrative, drawing on figures as disparate as Russian anarchist Victor Serge and the Parisian Bonnot Gang; Abu Jildeh, Arameet and their companions fighting the British in 1930’s Palestine; the artist as bandit in Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives; and Abbas and Abou-Rahme themselves in present-day Palestine.

The first part looks at the resonance between the inspiring, bizarre and sometimes tragic stories of these diverse bandits, the outsider rebel par excellence, often rewritten as mere criminals (or naively romanticised as wayward figures) and excluded from the narrative of revolutionary struggle. Ironically these figures most clearly articulate the incompleteness and inadequacies in existing oppositional movements political language and imaginary.

While the opening chapter expresses the longing for more radical forms of action and the characters' urgent need to overcome their unbearable living conditions, the second part, Unforgiving Years (2014) - which is premiering in the UK - looks at what happens when these gestures are unfulfilled, for those who are not killed, somehow left behind. It examines a recurrent impulse to refuse the seeming 'permanence' of a capitalist-colonial present, that though defeated at multiple moments, continues to resurge and return. Unforgiving Years is about things lost and others glimpsed in the wreckage, about what can be conjured into being from the ashes. A victory in defeat. A provocation to rethink the seemingly unimaginable.

Image: Richard T. Walker, the predicament of always (as it is) (2014)

Press Contact:
Khuroum Bukhari, khuroum@carrollfletcher.com

Opening: Thursday 24 September, 6-8pm

Carroll / Fletcher
56 - 57 Eastcastle Street, London
Tue - Sat 10am to 6pm, Sat 11am to 6pm

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