Join us Friday, April 11th from 7-9PM for
Williamsburg Second Friday Event
Walker Pickering: "Nearly West"
on view through April 27th
Front Room Gallery is proud to present “Nearly West,” a solo
exhibition of photographs by Austin based artist Walker Pickering. In
this series Pickering reflects on the subtleties in the landscape and
culture from West Texas to the Southern regions of the US. Through
the lens of travel and adventure, he seeks out the hidden among the
ordinary. Pickering’s work captures the mundane trappings of
travel, rest-stops and unexpected roadside encounters.
The places immortalized in Pickering’s work often show the wear of
time, they seem to have gone unnoticed for years, they have their own
lives and feel like they might never change—or they might be gone
already. In one of Pickering’s photographs a forgotten
architectural feature, an ornate entryway to a no longer existing
building, with the word “Mayflower” carved into the stone stands
guard over an empty plot in a field. In another photo, “Business
Cards,” a dimly lit storage space in an office, business cards are
taped to the walls cover every available surface, a textural overload
that has built over decades.
Pickering’s photographs in this series almost never have people in
them but the human hand is always evident in the environment. In
“Hole” a bucolic landscape containing a verdant river flows from
the distance towards the viewer, the lush fauna is reflected in the
river, an altogether beautiful scene—but centered in the middle of
the square photo is a large, completely unexplainable, circular hole
in the river. While the hole in the river is obviously man-made it is
a mysterious presence in the photo, a vortex to another dimension.
This is Walker Pickering’s first solo exhibition at The Front Room,
Walker received his MFA in photography from Savannah College of Art
and Design, and currently teaches photography at the Art Institute of
Austin.
