So That I Might Speak to You of Your Magnificence: Sculpture, Drawings and Installation by Sarah Walko
Feb. 2 – March 4, 2017

Artist Talk: Thursday, Feb. 2, 3 – 4 p.m. in the Bulmer Telecommunications Center Auditorium
Free and open to the public.

Opening Reception: Thursday, Feb. 2, 4-6 p.m. in the Teaching Gallery
Free and open to the public.

So That I Might Speak to You of Your Magnificence, an exhibition of sculpture, installation and drawings by Brooklyn artist Sarah Walko explores the mythic possibilities of objects, images and imagination. The artist mines the unknowable space between her combined materials for new possibilities of narrative, essence and reality. Using such disparate found materials as animal bones, bird nests, gems, flora, texts and test tubes, Walko distills their enigmatic qualities through juxtapositions that establish unexpected tableaux or situations. As ancient alchemists sought in their proto-scientific experiments a physical manifestation for intangible transitions of spirit and essence, Walko funnels these new relationships between objects to evoke the irrational and the illusory much as a shaman unites good and evil or consciousness and physical existence.

Read the press release for more information.

Photo by Thomas Wilson

This is a group exhibition that serves to demonstrate solidarity among artists who identify with being a Nasty Woman in the face of threats to roll back women’s rights, individual rights, and abortion rights. It also serves as a fundraiser to support organizations defending these rights and to be a platform for organization before the Trump Presidential Inauguration in January (Organized by Roxanne Jackson and Jessamyn Fiore).

Stills of a text projection made with visual artist John Ensor Parker and presented on the facade of the InterContinental Hotel, Miami, Florida.  The piece was within Form and Substance, a light and projection mapping exhibition during the week of Art Fairs in December 2015. Photos by John Ensor Parker, Michelle Dodson and Brian Dodson.

A new sculpture created with designer Nicole Penn. We added rhinestones to wasp’s nests & made tripods with porcupine quills. 

From Where I Live I See the Backs of Stars:

This is as far in this story as I can go. I stood at the end and began to walk. I collected things and walked a crooked path to the beginning. I walked to the point right after color invented, right after the darkness, which was pregnant with possibility, faded.

It’s here that I wait. I wait for you and the maps you read in the rings of your smoke trees. I wait for you to bring your water, your flames, your dead, your weight, your guides, your aids and your tools. I wait for you to point to where you keep your chant, inside your four-chambered heart and your pulmonary veins. I listen to the habits of your hands and feet.

Do you remember? When you looked all around you, and saw how everything was dotted with pinpoints of light? They were quiet and close in front of your eyes, like you brought the stars down from the sky wherever you looked. It could have been eyes you cannot trust. Or it could have been a phenomenon. Or, it could be that when things are of the same essence, there really is no space between them. No space at all.

It could be that it is not the entire universe with all of its detailed contents, nor the ancestral seas, nor the continental plates, nor our galaxy, nor all of the undiscovered others, which are that vast. It could be that is it simply us. We are infinitely wide.