MKG127 is very pleased to present Disruptions, an exhibition of new work by Joy Walker.
September 19 – October 24, 2020
Disruptions features sculptures, screen prints, woven textiles, and drawings. Her new body of work, writes Tatum Dooley in the exhibition essay, “participates in a game of broken telephone. It starts with a painting whispering in a drawing’s ear the descriptions of a paint stroke. Then the drawing tells a sculpture, which tells a screen print. Finally, the screen print takes great pains to tell a textile what a paint stroke is: a length of colour, patchy in places, and frayed at the ends. Walker’s work acts as a translator from one medium to another, allowing things to get lost in translation with the knowledge that within that process, something is added as well.”
This exercise in intermediality also references an array of modern artists, highlighting connections with Frank Stella’s paintings, Agnes Martin’s drawings, Fred Sandback’s sculptures, Roy Lichtenstein’s screenprints, and Anni Albers’s textiles. In engaging with various media, Walker’s work also engages with its gendered history. Her work includes a discussion between the masculine associations of painting and the feminine associations of textile work, and confronts these gendered characteristics by appropriating painting into textile. Her Jacquard tapestries also represent grids and mathematical forms, a visual language depicting Cartesian space and rationality that is also coded as masculine, making connections between them and the gridded techniques of weaving. Through this interplay in media, Walker’s new work invites a complex discussion about material technology, gender, and art history.
Read Tatum Dooley’s full exhibition essay here.
In lieu of an opening, Walker will be available to meet visitors by appointment on Saturdays during the run of the exhibition.
Joy Walker is a Montréal born, Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist. Walker’s current body of work addresses her research into the works of like-minded artists of a different generation – Anni Albers, Otti Berger, Sonya Delaunay and others who took similar paths – beginning their careers in textiles and later transitioning into the visual arts – with a key focus on their sketchbooks and notes pertaining to their personal thoughts regarding their work. Walker is also an educator in the field of Fabric Science.In May – June 2019, Walker produced artist projects at the TextielLab in Tilburg, Netherlands and at the Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, Netherlands. In January 2020, Walker was the recipient of the Chalmers Arts Fellowship awarded by the Ontario Arts Council.
Her work has been exhibited widely, including 8eleven Gallery, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (Toronto), Plug-In Institute of Contemporary Art (Winnipeg), Truck Gallery (Calgary), Dunlop Gallery (Regina), Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery, (Halifax), Rodman Hall (St. Catharines, ON), Cambridge Galleries (ON), Venice (Italy), NYC, Chicago, and Miami (USA). Walker’s works are held in several private and public collections including those of Cambridge Galleries (ON), le Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal (QC), The National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives (ON), BMO Financial Group Corporate Art Collection, Grant Thornton LLP, and TD Bank.
Joy Walker would like to acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.