Bianca Walker: Communion

T293 is proud to present “Communion”, the first solo exhibition in Europe by New-Orleans based artist Bianca Walker (b. 1997, California). On display, a series of house paint on drop cloth paintings.
The work of Bianca Walker (they/them) explores the history of colonization and the dichotomy between whiteness and the "other" by embracing simple methods of crafting, which emphasizes the primitive qualities of the materials. The work highlights the complexities and sustainability of a relationship broken by colonization and addresses the architecture of racism by challenging the erroneous presumption that a close connection with the environment and nature is an equivalent of being uncivilized.
For the exhibition “Communion”, Bianca Walker realized a series of works to honor the Black working class. Using images sourced from various digital public archives, mainly Black archival imagery, Walker creates portraits of people who were exploited by white supremacy from the late 1800s until early 1900s. Through an extensive physical progress – think of destroying the high aura of art – Bianca Walker enters the work with their whole body, living the lives of their figures and eventually becoming part of it. The artist does so by dripping house paint onto pieces of drop cloth that are then strung from a bended but rigid palm tree support. This seemingly careless gesture implicates on bringing the people figured in the paintings to a state of vulnerability but also, of freedom.
The show also features a series of stop-motion animations figuring acts of working repetitive patterns, such as cropping and harvesting. With a camera suspended above their desk, Walker crafts characters and environments out of found materials then manipulates their movements capturing each change in position as a photograph on the camera above; these individual images are put together to form a looped video of an act of labor. Vibrant scenes built of paint and cloth figuring dancing both backgrounds and protagonists highlight the spiritual aspects of a working activity and its importance to the greater environment; making a point that labor is an integral human act and therefore anyone who participates in act of labor has the right to do so in a state of joy and freedom.