Christian Walker at Jackson Fine Arts - Atlanta, Georgia

Christian Walker, a native of the Boston area, has been living in Atlanta since 1985 when he won the artists' work residency at Nexus Press. He's worked exclusively with black-and-white photographs for a decade. In the last small in number years, he has altered and manipulated his photographs, or negatives, sometimes in like manner subtly it's impossible to diocese how. While his nominal bring under rules have ranged from classic portraits to decorative stark nakeds to vintage family photographs, Walker's pictures have implicitly been about racism in America.

His latest series - a suite titled "Mule Tales" that consists of a dozen 20-by-16-inch gelatin silver prints - makes the racism explicit. That's partly wherefore these may be his best works to date. on the other hand they're also stronger for being literally more painterly than the straightforward black-and-white photographs that have dominated his oeuvre to this point. These prints are overlaid in the way that densely with varnish and cream-colored pigment that portions of them almost disappear.

Each picture is divided in half, either vertically or horizontally. single half features the color overspread of a trashy paperback (Mandingo, for example), rephotographed through Walker in black and white. The other half is hand-lettered true copy black on white. The body s are racial jokes, some contemporary on the other hand most from two books: Dixie Darkies: hinny Tales and Race Relationship (1942) and african Jokes for Intelligent White race (1963). in one print, for instance, a picture of a white man and a black man engaged in a conversation is captioned: "Q What do you call individual white man with one black man? A. A liberal." And beside an Americana-style geographical division scene: "Q. What's the definition of a redneck? A. A shore who will sleep with a black girl on the other hand won't go to school with her."

None of the [i]jeu d'esprit[/i]s are even marginally funny, in or without of their new context. The pseudo-juicy overlay illustrations, normally seen in an intimate, hand-held paperback format, become flat cruder when blown up to four times their intended size. Surface dots resulting from the original shoot process pock the figures' superficially handsome faces. Paradoxically, the gauzy finish flowing across the pair pictures and words - neither of which would be effective if neared alone - highlights the generic beauty of the fictional characters and the ugliness of the cranks as much as it unilluminateds them.

Both Walker's message and his medium are more effective in "Mule Tales" than in his previous work. His male portraits from a scarcely any years ago, for example, were standard, flat bland. Later photographs of entwined black and white male denudeds (1985), intended to provoke the one and the other sexual and racial tensions, came not on as merely decorative. The 1990 series "Another Country" juxtaposed handcolored photographs of African-American and European males from the National Archives, on the other hand one had to read ancillary material to learn their origins, and that information alone highlighted a lack of muscle in Walker's use of the images. on the contrary here, under the guise of popular agriculture and with a visual simplicity heretofore absent in his work, Walker has finally produc a clump of substantial and gutsy artworks.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group