published in: The U.N.I.O.N #1, Stockholm 2004

Kelley Walker: Fake But Yet So Real

In Kelly Walkers solo show at Paula Cooper one was immediately struck by three huge carved out recycling signs. On the entire right side of the gallery several off-set prints of a rendered brick wall were stacked across the wall, not photographically represented, more like brick-wall the feeling. Nailed on the other walls are a number of posters, black and white images with what at first glance looks like cheesy computer effects on top. Lastly, as one exits a large emblematic picture piece hung with the word "solidarity" spelled across, giving off a quite homey quality.

The recycling signs, or objects, are covered with different texture samples, such as plated gold leaf - is it fake? - and scanned, enlarged cut-outs made from a dry food box. If we bring the idea of recycling to nature, we think of preserving the origin, the authentic. Here the sign itself was made out of a conglomerate of materials, all but real. Nothing is preserved, but rather set into new indefinite use, recuperation of the original is to generationally remove. The signs are flat objects, not hung but leaning against air in mid space, images reused as something else, movable replaceable parts. Recycling elements, recycling our brains for meaning, making sense through circulation, no rebus or preset answer.

The flat synthetic brick wall reads as a texture more than anything else; the ones you would scan and reuse in a 3d program that construct virtual environments, as in any computer game or in corporate reports using fake marble backgrounds. Bricks, an organic repetitively organized surface material, here re-repeated by the off set prints grid repetition on the wall, 'exposed brick walls' is a desirable New York real estate feature, here only an 1/8" thickness. This is texture art, where reality is a surface to be scanned, inserted and recognized as a texture from Max Paine or any other popular game. A walk through simulation.

The image in the poster on the rear wall reminds me of civil rights images from the sixties, and from there to Andy Warhol's screens of these images. It seems like a sensationalist Benetton ad with a well needed color slab on top. Now the colors are not the colors of Benetton, in more ways than just the literal. They are pastel light neon nuances, covering the image in some expressionistic gesture. The 'effect' looks like the ones I would generate easily in Photoshop the first time I used it - feeling excited for mastering my new domain. But this addition on the appropriated image is fake, it is not computer generated - or it is real - using Aquafresh toothpaste, hence the acidic clean colors, shaped by a real hand, then scanned and placed as a layer on top of the image. What difference does it make? (As a child if you swear, your parents would tell you to go wash your mouth!) Kelley Walker is not black, slipping out of one into another prescribed sub or minority group category, not letting united colors of Benetton seal your ethnic color on top of you but re-using the tropes to make recycling and meaningful sliding possible.

This poster is the 'product' from this show, it comes with a CD with the layered digital file of the poster for the collector's re-treatment, or free re-use of the components. Add your colors. Walker's giving up control over the end product is not only conceptually coherent; it fuses the viewing and the purchasing. The recycling attitude continues outside of the white box through the contract of purchase. Meaning is re-use, in a Wittgensteinian sampling.

As you leave, the last piece on view seems like it was made to hang in your grand-father's basement as one of his hobby-mades. There are several scanned images of owls, also known as the animal of knowledge. The line of text, a scanned embroidery, reads "solidarity" - an overused word like so many others from utopic political discourse, emptied of all local meaning. This weird object takes on an urgent personal presence, it is new authentic. There is real politics in signification beyond plain appropriation.

Microsoft is not the one answer to cultural globalism. Instead of being renegotiated, the meaning of the elements in this show is recycled. Using this environmentalist attitude of circulation we could start again to re/use "play" with words like "freedom" or "revolution" - This show was refreshing like a car re-freshener, made out of Florida lemons driving with open windows scanning a meadow made of ... Reuse your old plastic bag just strech it to fit - recycle!