Texas Biennial: Jade Walker

Texas Biennial: Jade Walker

Apr 21–May 14, 2011

April 21 – May 14, 2011
Gallery 4

Featuring Jade Walker

As part of the Texas Biennial 2011, Contemporary at Blue Star and Big Medium present Texas Biennial:  Jade Walker, featuring a sculptural installation entitled “Quadri-Poise” by Jade Walker, curated by Virginia Rutledge.  The opening reception for this event will be held on Thursday, May 5 from 6 to 8 pm.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

My work consists of a personal struggle with spectatorship, binaries within gender, abstraction, narrative, found objects, desire, and the body as temporal. I am interested in focusing on the ideology of American society in respect to the image of the figure and translating that into a tangible object. The macro of the body and the micro of each organ or skin feature are present in each work, evident in small stitches and massive stuffed bulbous forms. Empathy, fear, longing, and rage all find viable moments in the work with an underlying feeling of familiarity, sometimes nostalgia.

BIOGRAPHY:

In addition to her role as director of the Visual Arts Center in the Department of Art and Art History at UT Austin, Walker creates installations and sculptures based on physical aspects of the human body and personal experiences. She received her B.F.A. from the University of Florida and her M.F.A. from The University of Texas at Austin. She was the venue coordinator at the Baughman Center, a division of the University of Florida Performing Arts Center and held a position at the Austin Museum of Art. Walker has attended residencies in the United States (Tennessee, North and South Carolina) and Taiwan. Her work has been exhibited throughout Texas and at Centro Cultural de Nuevo in Mexico. Most recently, her work was exhibited in the inaugural New Works exhibition series at the Austin Museum of Art, which introduces fresh contemporary art by innovative Austin artists. She is a member of the Texas Sculpture Group and has worked with Fuse Box, an annual contemporary art and performance festival held in Austin each April.

The Texas Biennial is a project of Big Medium, an Austin-based non-profit 501(c)3 organization dedicated to promoting contemporary visual art in Texas, taking place in Austin, Houston, and San Antonio.