NYAB Event - Walker Pickering “Nearly West”

Walker Pickering “Nearly West”

The Front Room

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Toby Kamps, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Menil Collection Front Room Gallery is proud to present “Nearly West,” a solo exhibition of photographs by Austin based artist Walker Pickering. In this series Pickering reflects on the subtleties in the landscape and culture from West Texas to the Southern regions of the US. Through the lens of travel and adventure, he seeks out the hidden among the ordinary. Pickering’s work captures the mundane trappings of travel, rest-stops and unexpected roadside encounters.

Pickering The places immortalized in Pickering’s work often show the wear of time, they seem to have gone unnoticed for years, they have their own lives and feel like they might never change—or they might be gone already. In one of Pickering’s photographs a forgotten architectural feature, an ornate entryway to a no longer existing building, with the word “Mayflower” carved into the stone stands guard over an empty plot in a field. In another photo, “Business Cards,” a dimly lit storage space in an office, business cards are taped to the walls cover every available surface, a textural overload that has built over decades.

Pickering’s photographs in this series almost never have people in them but the human hand is always evident in the environment. In “Hole” a bucolic landscape containing a verdant river flows from the distance towards the viewer, the lush fauna is reflected in the river, an altogether beautiful scene—but centered in the middle of the square photo is a large, completely unexplainable, circular hole in the river. While the hole in the river is obviously man-made it is a mysterious presence in the photo, a vortex to another dimension.

This is Walker Pickering’s first solo exhibition at The Front Room, Walker received his MFA in photography from Savannah College of Art and Design, and currently teaches photography at the Art Institute of Austin.