Ericka Walker

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Ericka Walker, “Savagery” (detail), 2015

graphite rubbing and screenprint on handmade paper, 22" x 15" (courtesy of the artist)

There’s nothing like uncertainty and a global pandemic to generate a little Fluxus. Printmaker Ericka Walker’s exhibition, A decaying fort and a lack of guidance, at the Kelowna Art Gallery until July 11, presents what looks like chance operation. The viewer creates meaning, connecting the visual and the textual, almost as if Walker leaves this up to us. But, to quote the title piece, there’s no “lack of guidance” here. 

Small works on white handmade paper combine feathery screen-printed illustrations (maps, neoclassical and Roman ruins, various putti, landscapes and clouds) that we assume are integrated thematically, with superimposed text. The overall themes – empire, colonization, hegemonic male supremacy, whiteness implicit, and the forceful domination of the natural world and its peoples – hit us through the text.

Walker’s tools are the words of the oppressors, literally. The text derives from commemorative monument plaques she captures in graphite rubbings at various sites. She rearranges words and phrases like refrigerator-magnet poetry, intending to create new meaning (“cheeky,” she calls it), and to re-present history. Contrary to Audre Lorde’s prediction that we will never dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools, in Walker’s works, these words work pretty well. 

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Ericka Walker, “A decaying fort and a lack of guidance,” 2021

installation view at the Kelowna Art Gallery (courtesy Kelowna Art Gallery)

Visually, the text is a collection of graphite scumblings, but intellectually, how can we ignore such statements, however disjointed their conjunction: “the reopening of a wound … bears witness to the impact of the struggle for empire.” Or: “The surviving colonists thrived … gentle rather than heroic” (ellipses mine).

Walker was awarded the show as the winner of the 2018 Okanagan Print Triennial, but this is not the strident, multi-colour, hard-hitting poster work we associate with her. This work maintains her focus on the mythologies of North American dominion and expansion, visualized as propaganda, in a new way: monochromatic, deceptively subtle, yet packing a punch. 

The pandemic limited her to monuments of her current home province, Nova Scotia, host to a surprising concentration of serial conquests and colonizations. Her positionality as an American and as a woman provides a sharp outsider view. She shows restraint in not ‘speaking’ for colonized others, but neither is she blinded by British/Canadian nationalism. 

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Ericka Walker, “Propriety” (diptych 1 of 2), 2015

graphite rubbing and screenprint on handmade paper, 22" x 15" (courtesy of the artist)

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Ericka Walker, “Propriety” (diptych 2 of 2), 2015

graphite rubbing and screenprint on handmade paper, 22" x 15" (courtesy of the artist)

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Close looking reveals treasures: intentionally varied fonts; the textural pleasure of ghost letters straining the paper; tiny notations of the monuments’ provenances pencilled in a corner. Such attention to detail and process give Walker away. These seemingly random memes have been carefully crafted. Still, there’s a hint of the guerrilla hit and run, the graphic gift of repurposed meaning we sometimes find in things pasted over things on subway walls and billboards. 

Who then brings meaning to the reading? The works have an ethereal quality, but vague text and irony are timid tools amidst today’s calls for open talk about truth, racism, violence against women, and reconciliation for Indigenous peoples. Leaving so much removed seems not so much Fluxus as facile. But maybe not. As a propaganda scholar, Walker understands visual manipulation. Maybe visual subtlety and inconclusive text give space for individual historiographic shifts, and allow us to create meaning for ourselves. ■  

Ericka Walker: A decaying fort and a lack of guidance at the Kelowna Art Gallery in British Columbia from April 10 to July 11, 2021.

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