Good Vibrations
It is so easy to get caught up in the movement in our lives. We can get overloaded sometimes by what seems like a never ending stream of tasks and responsibilities. It’s also easy to be distracted and/or rightfully concerned about the current state of the world, whether that be the spectre of climate change, international conflict, or the creeping unknown that is AI.
Taryn Walker’s exhibition Echoes From a Time Not Yet Here is an invitation to temporarily suspend those preoccupations and move toward stillness. Their multimedia - multidimensional expressions reflect a deep responsiveness to the world that still holds the promise of a positive future. Their practice is powerfully grounded, and imaginatively engaged in a way that effortlessly creates a space for us to pause.
To breathe.
To listen.
In the large-scale wall drawing, and the many smaller drawings preserved in wax, and in the video and field recordings that they have shared with us, there is a sense of tenderness and wonder. There is promise, and a teaching. The wax soaked figures Walker has conjured out of the ethers and preserved for future generations, reverberate for us now with positive, forward-looking visions for our collective possibility.
VIU and the VIEW Gallery are excited to host Taryn Walker and her exhibition Echoes From a Time Not Yet Here and are honoured to have the opportunity to share their work with our community.
We are also grateful to Justine Chambers for her articulate response to Taryn’s practice in her thoughtful essay Feeling Into Future.
Chai Duncan
VIEW Gallery Curator
Department of Art and Design
Moss, Rocks and Long Walks
Artist Statement by Taryn Walker
“There is an ancient conversation going on between mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure. About light and shadow and the drift of continents. This is what has been called the "dialect of moss on stone - an interface of immensity and minuteness, of past and present, softness and hardness, stillness and vibrancy, yin and yang.” ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss
This exhibition brings together works created over the past three and a half years. A journey of making that has taken me from the period of being a fresh BFA graduate, to pandemic creating in my living room, and then currently, to the beginning of my MFA studies. During this time there have been many beginnings, many presents, and many ends. And there will continue to be...
Feeling into the Future
Essay by Justine A. Chambers
Where do you begin telling someone their world is not the only one?
— Lee Maracle, Ravensong[1].
The Otherwise, as the elaboration of the alternative, presumes that radically different relations have and do already exist.
— Ashon Crawley, Against the Normative World[2]
Our senses are not hierarchical. We are bodies that feel our experience with all of our senses at once. Social, political, cultural organizing structures place one sense above another, often prioritizing “seeing is believing.” Taryn Walker unsettles occular-centricity without rejecting the work of the eye, and invites us back in to the simultaneity of sensing as a non-hierarchical act of reciprocity, care and joy. In a lateral organization of our fleshly practices, we have all that we need. It is all around us. Feeling is believing...
