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KELLEY WALKER
Born 1969, Columbus, Georgia; lives in New York, New York With a computer and a flatbed scanner, Kelley Walker turns squirts of toothpaste into colorful abstractions, photographs objects such as cutout cereal boxes, and scans archival images for reproduction; he then uses Photoshop to layer his scanned images in superflat collages or to enlarge them to make equally flat sculptures. This digitally induced leveling serves to critique the way in which the proliferation of images causes them to lose their historical content, becoming literally two-dimensional. In Schema: Aquafresh plus Crest with Tartar Control (2003), toothpaste is scrawled across a news photograph taken during the 1960s of a police dog savagely attacking a black civil rights protester. Walker's layering of the once-shocking with the mundane causes these images to inform each other— tartar control takes on sinister undertones, while the apparent erasure of the infamous image causes us to see it afresh— so that neither can be exempted from its historicity. ESM |
Black Star Press (rotated 90 degrees); Black Press, Black Star, 2005. Milk chocolate and dark chocolate on digital print on canvas, 84 x 208 in. (213.4 x 528.4 cm). Carlos and Rosa de la Cruz Collection; courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
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