Douglas Walker: Other Worlds

The Justina M. Barnicke Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of recent works by Toronto-based artist Douglas Walker. Titled Other Worlds, Walker’s exhibition synthesizes the artist’s past pictorial concerns in an architecturally transformative series of wall-sized monochromatic paintings of fantastical, other-worldly imagery.

Douglas Walker has always paid homage to multiple visual traditions, including historical fine art illustration and the graphic production strategies found in ‘outsider art’ and tattoo culture. All of the works in this exhibition simulate crackled 18th century Delft Blue ceramic glazing—which itself quotes the Chinese porcelain that was highly valued by colonial Dutch traders. Using a resist technique of Walker’s invention, images emerge from multiple, simultaneous applications of water and oil-based materials that often yield unexpected textural results. The crackled patterns in the interior ‘spaces’ of many of these depictions call to mind cellular structures and micro-organic matter; rendered together they form transparent, x-ray-like images of animals, structures, figures and ethereal landscapes.

The interweaving of multiple dichotomies—figure and ground, near and far, past and future—in the spatial matrix of a Dutch-tiled grid evokes a strangely distended, millennial moment. Just as the graphic figures in his paintings are entangled in an ornamental, tomb-like present, in Walker’s tiled, architectural setting we are left uncertain whether what we are looking at is a part of this world – or another.