Kelley Walker

Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

London, Royal Academy of Arts, USA Today: New American Art from The Saatchi Gallery, 2006, pp. 388-389, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is deeper and richer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition.
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Kelly Walker's appropriated images look to re-invent source imagery that range from photography of historic and political events to various aspects of popular culture. In all his explorations, Walker seeks to highlight the underlying tension and angst of our modern day society. We Joked That Under The Paving Slabs There Was Gold re-ignites the inferred panic behind an anti-Capitalist poster with the slogan Resist Capitalism, interrogate spatial relationships. By partly submerging the original imagery, the artist successfully shifts and twists its intended focus. The image taken from life is now in the realm of fiction, the intervention of the artist has removed it from its original context. From the collapsed bridge now oozes a radio-active flourescent mass, reflective in conjunction with the title, of the ever stronger seduction of power and wealth and the lengths to which man will go to reach them.

The medium Walker chooses to execute his works is also indignant of his approach to the role of the artist. By producing his art on a CD to be fabricated onto canvas, Walker blurs the notion of authorship, and challenges the established concepts of authenticity, production, commodity and distribution. In the present example, we are presented with a horrific yet strangely appealing image, the altered rhetoric exposes society's absorption of car-crash media.