Corban Walker: Resist
Solomon Fine Art, Dublin
★★★★☆
Corban Walker has had a long, accomplished career: a member of Aosdána and recipient of the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Award, he represented Ireland at the 54th Venice Biennale, in 2011, and his solo exhibitions have been held at leading arts venues across the globe, from Dublin to New York (his home until recently). Now settled in Cork, the 58-year-old artist returns to Solomon Fine Art for his second exhibition with the Dublin gallery.
Walker’s practice has been preoccupied with the fundamentals of construction: how materials, with their own unique morphological properties, can be moulded, shaped and combined to accommodate human presence.
Over the past 30 years the artist has explored the underlying compositional principles that render environments suitable for human occupation and use: his sculptures defamiliarise the architectural concepts of structure, scale, utility and proportion, making them concrete and tangible factors, subject to interrogation and, ultimately, to revision.
This ethos is in keeping with any number of critical architectural frameworks developed in the 20th and 21st centuries, not least by the controversial yet highly influential philosopher Martin Heidegger. In a late essay from 1951, the German phenomenologist distinguished “building” from “dwelling”.
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“Dwelling” is the more originary term, according to Heidegger’s metaphysics, and serves as a prompt to rethink our built environment as a mode of nurturing and safeguarding essential features of our humanity. For Walker, the starting point for his investigation into habituation stems from his personal circumstances: born with achondroplasia, the artist is 122cm (or 4ft) tall and is required to negotiate obstacles unnoticed by most people.
In Resist, Walker continues to experiment with his long-standing preoccupations across a variety of sculptural works. Untitled (Resist) and Untitled (116 Stack @ 5°), for instance, both consist of simple arrangements of wooden slats, assembled with mathematical precision into interlocking columns.
The results are striking, minimalist constructions that seem to borrow from both architectural and physiological domains: on the one hand they look like models for a futuristic skyscraper, on the other hand they remind one of anatomical vertebrae. Both lean sideways, a gentle asymmetry that suggests a gradual process of subsidence, imbalance and eventual collapse.
This appearance of precarity – the sense that material arrangements are about to be eradicated by the inevitable unleashing of force – is rife throughout the show.
Take Untitled (Reuse It, For MW). This work comprises a tall, slim wooden post, standing on one end, as though ready to tip over at the slightest touch, atop a horizontal steel girder. Or Untitled (Reuse It Again), which plays with the opacity of its glass cubes to conjure the impression of ice, slowly melting.
And then there are the explicitly titled “annihilation” works, Untitled (Baby Annihilation) and Untitled (Annihilation Stream). Each sculpture features a large pair of industrial aluminium pillars between which, positioned delicately, sits a tower of dried porcelain clay, the lightweight, desiccated material announcing, by contrast, its fragility, its susceptibility to crumbling and disintegration.
All that being said, we should spend a moment to reflect on Walker’s exhibition title. After all, though his work in Resist suggests its own erasure, that point is never reached: collapse may be a spectre, only appearing to be imminent. A state of equilibrium is always at risk from the very forces it contains, but its structure plays them off one another. Therein lies its dynamism.
Resist is at Solomon Fine Art, Dublin, until Saturday, November 15th
