Harrison Walker
Harrison Walker describes what he does as creating prints and/as objects. In his first solo exhibition at Candela Gallery, he presents his Portals project. In this series, he uses the most basic elements of photography - light, paper, and chemicals - to explore color, chemistry, and psychological perception. Each of Harrison’s striking images are the same in some very important ways - he uses the same 20-inch steel disk in each piece, placed in the same place each time on uniformly sized paper. And yet there is endless variation in the work, which consists so far of over 130 prints. Each of the prints embodies his effort to push the boundaries of what he does not fully understand or control, whether it is the chemical process of making the print itself, the celestial worlds that inspire his work, or the meditative act of looking at the work and the responses it provokes.
Harrison Walker: Portals is on view at Candela Books and Gallery through June 16, 2018.
“With the series Portals there is an instruction manual. A little bit excessive, but I’ve recorded each material and step that I’ve taken to create each print with the idea that I can follow these instructions and you can follow these instructions and we’ll both get different things. Maybe they’ll be the same, maybe they’ll be different. If you make one in Richmond and I make one in Athens, I bet they’ll be different.
I’m very interested in the way there is this kind of instructional or recipe factor to it. So there’s a phrase - wash and dry the print - that’s probably in the manual a thousand times. It feels like this coming back point, this reset. I coat a piece of paper, I make an exposure, and I wash and dry the print. It feels like a chorus.”
Paige hosts the LookSEE podcast and is a freelance audio producer, an art lover, and a lifelong Richmonder. Her favorite place to be is in a museum. A close second is a bookstore.
