Solo exhibition highlights work of VAC Director Jade Walker

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Friday, February 19, 2016

UT’s Visual Arts Center Director Jade Walker (M.F.A., Studio Art, 2005) has a solo exhibition “Four Cornered” on view at Texas State University through March 10. Walker's soft sculptures consist of her personal struggle with spectatorship, binaries within gender, abstraction, narrative, found objects, desire and the body as temporal. In addition to her role as director of the VAC, Walker curates annual exhibitions at the Courtyard Gallery in the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center and W Austin, and also sits on the Art in Public Places Committee for the City of Austin. We caught up with Walker recently to ask her about “Four Cornered.”

Can you tell us more about the title of your show, “Four Cornered”?

The idea for “Four Cornered” comes from both my interest in Peruvian, four-corned traditional hats—which are mostly embroidered in wool hats—and the idea of paring down the room and giving it four corners.

I find the hats interesting because of the way they speak to the history of the hat culture in Peru. I was thinking about how Peruvians wear different hats at different altitudes and how each type of hat positions a wearer to a specific region. I also am interested in the way a hat like that fits on your head, that sort of moment of hat-and-head and suction.

There’s a shape that appears throughout your show—a sort of tall, elongated trapezoid. You see it in the fabric sculptures, in these sort of splayed-outward crutches that are supporting the sculptures, in embroidery patterns and even in the shape of the room itself. How does this shape fit in with your work, and what does it mean to you?

Most of that shape comes from very early work that I was making in graduate school with men’s neckties. I was utilizing the ties as a raw material and sewing them together, trying to form shapes out of them. And the natural inclination is that there’s the dip in the tie as it gets really thin around the neck, and if you sew that together and then fold it over, it becomes this shape that I really loved. And so I made a bunch of those. I started making the shape out of other fabrics, but I’m always true to the pattern of that shape.

What I like is that there’s something that references a small animal or stuffed animal. I’ve heard people call them kitties a lot, like kittens. Because when you fold the fabric over, it tends to have this little ear-y shape.

So this shape has come back into my studio over and over, and I just thought for this exhibition that I really wanted to get deep into that form. I wanted you to walk into that shape. I wanted all the objects to be that shape. And I also wanted to cut out any color deviation so that’s just one color and one shape throughout the whole exhibition.

You received your M.F.A. here at UT. What was it about the program that drew you to Texas?

There were lots of people in the faculty whose work I respected when selecting a school—in studio practice, but also scholars in our department. I realized that in coming here, I could work really openly between different mediums, so if I wanted to go work in other areas, I would have the flexibility to do that. Our department reflects that now with those departments being merged, and that’s the way that artists are progressing. That freedom is, I think, what really drew me here.

How does your work as an artist shape or influence your role as the director of the Visual Arts Center—and vice-versa?

The ability to understand the artist studio practice is definitely helpful as a director, and I’ll also say that almost all the people who are on our team do have a studio practice.

And in the reverse, it’s always inspiring to spend time with artists and scholars and designers and educators and historians—people who are thinking about art every minute. That’s always inspiring for my practice.

“Four Cornered” is on view through March 10 in University Gallery inside the Joan Cole Mitte Building on the corner of Sessom and Comanche streets on the Texas State University campus. Galleries are open daily from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Photos of "Four Cornered" by Erin Cunningham.

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