Jason Walker: Human Made Wild

Solo Show: Ceramic Sculpture

August 1 - September 12, 2009

reception: 8/1 4 - 6pm

 show overview

"For quite some time, I have explored the idea of 'nature'. What is it exactly? How do we perceive and define it, and why? In America we hold tightly to a very dualistic view of nature. A view that has created two separate worlds - the human made world and the non-human made world – or in other words culture and nature. This view places human beings on the outside of nature and one place that embodies our most ideal perception of nature is wilderness. About wilderness William Cronon wrote, "For Americans wilderness stands as the last remaining place where civilization, that all too human disease, has not fully infected the earth. It is an island in the polluted sea of urban-industrial modernity, the one place we can turn for escape from our own too-muchness."

Paradoxically, it is from this too-muchness our idea of wilderness is conceived. I have come to realize my own appreciation of nature has come from culture, and I wonder how I would perceive nature in its absence? I have titled this show Human Made Wild, to reference how wild and wilderness are constructs of my culture, and the way I think about nature comes from these constructs, The pieces for this show are simply explorations of this idea. The imagery was gathered by walking 75 miles of trail through Yosemite National Park and many more miles of concrete through Chicago Illinois, two iconic American landscapes, with my sketchbook. The pieces are an attempt to merge these two opposing places together to say it is time to rethink our perceptions of nature, culture, wilderness and civilization, in hopes we can once again reinstate our own naturalness and perhaps one day find balance between ourselves, and the planet."

Jason Walker - 2009

Walker, currently living in Bellingham, Washington received his BFA from Utah State University in 1996 and his MFA from Pennsylvania State University in 1999. Human Made Wild, is his second solo exhibition at Ferrin Gallery and presents his most complex and ambitious works to date. His work will be shown by the gallery in a group show "The Illisculptors" this fall.

Walker's piece "Desert Frog", 2008 is currently on view at the Berkshire Museum, Pittsfield, MA in their exhibition "Frogs, A Chorus of Colors".