Sarah Walker
Maximum Information Density
5 September – 19 October 2002

Sarah Walker applies systems theory to paint, producing work that is both highly theoretical and extremely personal. Systems theory asserts that no matter how complex or diverse our world, we will always discover different types of organization within it. Walker's large dense canvases explore the structural kinship between private mental space and public cyberspace. At the foundation of these two seemingly disparate realms is highly organized information. The differences lie in the ability of each to connect and communicate facts into ideas. Like systems theory itself, Walker's visual inquiry invokes many areas including philosophy, biology, psychology, mathematics, technology, and spirituality. She takes the common denominators:cells, zeros, ones, synapses, connectors; and translates the complex intersection of science and spirituality into the very human and personal realms of painting and looking.

The paintings meld neural networks with the world wide web: flat nodes correlate to facts, and dimensional jewel-like forms loosely correspond to ideas. The all-over composition of the works relates to an organic grid deep within its layers. Strong horizontal features imply a continuum as if what is being seen is just a fraction of the whole. Clustering circles, strands, stars, and nodes within a stratified composition are at once galaxies and pathologic cross-sections. Delicate tentacles interconnect into nets embedded a background both liquid and solid while cellular orbs seem to bubble around, carbonating right off the canvas. These scientific fictions are visceral, inviting rational and emotional reactions from the microscopic to the cosmic.

Walker's palette leans toward the symbolic, both corporeal and cerulean: lipidinous yellows and fleshy tones locate the body but cool skyward blues lift us into the spiritual and philosophical. Blue "seldom occurs in the natural world except as a translucency, that is to say as an accumulation of emptiness, the void of the Heavens, of the deepness of the sea, of crystal or diamond." For Buddhists it is the color of transcendent wisdom. For Walker it is where knowledge becomes spiritual awareness: the Spiraculum aeternatus. This medieval alchemical term refers to "the air hole through which eternity wafts into the terrestrial world." This bridge between two spatial realms also presents itself in archetypal psychology where it refers to the meeting place between the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. Walker extends this to where individual organic neural networks connect with synthetic cyber networks.

True to systems theory, in looking at cybergenic organization we are better able to understand the construct of our own brains, and vice versa. But whereas it is always clear where the computer ends and the person begins, we will never resolutely know where the brain ends and the mind begins. This gray area of gray matter is the double-helix of Sarah Walker's paintings.