Corban Walker: As Far As I Can See

Corban Walker is an internationally renowned artist based in Ireland who creates installations, sculpture and drawings that focus on human-made systems and perceptions of scale.

In this exhibition Walker’s distinctive sculptural and installation works are sited in Crawford Art Gallery’s historic Gibson and Long Room galleries where they disorientate and reorientate audience perceptions to navigate known familiar spaces of the gallery.

In removing the Gallery’s significant Collection works from the part wood-panelled Gibson Galleries, Walker will create a new work responding to this context which addresses the interplay between space and perception. Consisting of a mirrored installation, the work disrupts and constructs alternative conditions where the viewer may become part of the object.

Along with interventions of recent glass and amber acrylic works including Untitled (10 x 4 mitre) and 129-40, Walker has sited the installation TV Man astride the 19th-century grand staircase where the artist’s image fits, to scale, in a 65-inch screen. Where paintings of eighteenth-century luminaries of the British Empire have previously been sited, Walker constructs and reclaims marginalised histories and, in the process, also underwrites the future.

In addition, Walker’s perceptive selection of over thirty works from the Gallery’s Collection in the eighteenth-centuryLong Room, further brings the artist’s perspective to the fore and questions – as Corban Walker has noted – ‘how we orientate ourselves to recognizable objects and environments, both in very specific compositions and by opposite stylistic means.’

Walker’s specific philosophies of scale and sensitivity to local and cultural contexts are central to how he defines and realises his work. As artist and critic Brian O’Doherty has written “Corban Walker establishes himself as measure of his own art as body as mirror, module, standard. With this insistence - it is nothing less - he remakes his environment according to his own measure.” 
In offering audiences an opportunity to interrogate their own actions and interactions with the world around them, As Far as I Can See by Corban Walker is a compelling exhibition which alters and enriches understanding of perception and the human-scale.