Untitled

Untitled belongs to Walker’s series of "brick paintings" or silkscreen prints mounted on canvas which he began producing in 2005. In these vertically oriented works, details of news media can be glimpsed through a screen of bricks. Here, this layer of images and text was taken from an anthology of Life magazine stories.[1] The cover of the book is adhered to the back of the canvas. While the selection may seem arbitrary at first glance, careful looking reveals that the artist juxtaposed photographs that reflect progress in the arenas of American civil and human rights alongside images of devastating violence or its aftermath.

To produce these works, the artist scanned individual bricks and cinder blocks and combined them into a gridded composition. This highly mediated approach was tempered by the artist’s manual application of the print. According to Walker, "I print the silkscreens on canvas with uneven, uncalibrated hand pressure. This results in a mostly off-color photographic image, with infinite unseen variations."[2]

[1] Tony Chiu and Richard B. Stolley, eds. Life: Our Century in Pictures. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1999.

[2] Kelley Walker. Kelley Walker, exh. cat., Centre National d’Art Contemporain Grenoble, 2008, p. 75.