Untitled

Both a study of contemporary image-making processes and a consideration of the nature of urban space, Kelley Walker’s Untitled (2009) is a vision of the city’s material and immaterial qualities at once playful and imposing. Deconstructing a symbolic icon of urban architecture – the brick wall – Walker’s work reflects the way in which the reproduced image and the physical object interrelate in the urban milieu. Walker’s artistic practice centres on his path-breaking use of digital scanners, conceptually playing with the interactions that take place between the visual and material, and here the artist uses the scanner to generate almost literal building blocks for his work, scanning individual bricks into his computer before laying them out into wall-like patterns over in Photoshop. Yet, against this digital wall, a very human visual poetry emerges, the bricks themselves possessing an unexpected delicacy and individuality in their hand-printed variations of colour and texture. Having developed his pattern on his computer, the artist then subsequently prints the image with the four colour process deployed in everyday printing, separating the file into four silkscreens of cyan, magenta, yellow and black and applying one on top of the other, using manual pressure in order to produce a beautifully uneven colouring, rather than achieving the perfect mechanical replication of an offset machine. Around the patterns, the artist collages copies of newspapers and magazines – here using a retro copy of Playboy magazine – further locating the image in a physical, human reality. Where the first stage of Walker’s process automates what is usually a manual process, here he works by hand to mimic the technological production of images. In this sense, the work metaphorises the way in which visual information saturates the contemporary urban space, using technology to reproduce the images that make up the wall itself, both in its reproductions of Playboy’s pages, and in the very bricks themselves.