NYAB Event - Maria Walker “The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you”

Maria Walker “The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you”

Projekt722

This event has ended.

Walker makes paintings by treating wood, canvas, and paint with equal importance. She assembles her stretchers from variously sized wooden boards, and also culls wood from previous stretchers, which carry the memory (and paint stains) of previous paintings. The canvas and paint are applied as an extension of this wooden drawing without privileging the surface. As a result, the paintings at times appear to be inside out, while others are reversible and can be displayed with either side facing forward. Walker’s paintings demonstrate economy and backbone; in her work, nothing is wasted.

Walker’s three-dimensional stretchers develop their own internal logic, but they also often refer to real-world objects of personal importance, including Shaker furniture, the cello, trees, and particular windows (from her studio or Walker’s childhood home). In these works the paintings read simultaneously as object, memory, and picture plane. In other paintings, Walker works with the element of time, using her paintings as clocks or calendars, creating time-based visual documents of the studio practice.

Walker’s process can be compared to a writer’s notebook, wherein scraps of old correspondence, poems, or thoughts are continuously combined with fresh observations, memories, or plans. Indeed, Walker maintains a simultaneous practice as a poet, and we are very pleased to offer a limited-edition hand-sewn chapbook of her poems in conjunction with the exhibition. The show’s title is taken from “The Breeze at Dawn,” a poem by the 13th-century Sufi poet, Rumi. The poem speaks to Walker’s clear-eyed, materially grounded studio practice, and also to the sense of wonder that this process, and the resulting painting-objects, can entail.