Solo Exhibition, Autofiction | Jackson, Wy
Altamira Fine Art Jackson is pleased to present a solo exhibition for Jackson Hole artist Travis Walker. His new show, titled "Autofiction", will feature a dozen new paintings ranging in size from 24 x 30 to 48 x 60 inch cavases.
Join us for the artist reception Saturday, December 15th from 4-7pm at our Jackson, WY location.
Travis Walker’s paintings park at the crossroads of fantasy and reality, fiction and autobiography, comedy and tragedy, satire and seriousness. They are as quirky as they are critical; as personal as they are universal. Straddling conditions as he does, Walker has settled into his own understanding of the West and his place within it.
Walker spent his youth bouncing around the globe in an Air Force family. His first encounters with Western mythology were in books, movies, and music. The entertainment served as a counterpoint to the flat suburbias of his childhood. When it came time to plant himself in a profession in college, he tried majoring in environmental science at Virginia Tech. A painting field trip inspired him to transfer to Virginia Commonwealth University and pursue a fine-arts degree. After graduation, Walker decided to move West after recognizing that the poster he
had hung on his wall in high school, of Ansel Adams’ “Snake River Overlook,” depicted the mountain range neighboring the town of Jackson.
The scope of Adams (and his predecessor in Western landscapes Thomas Moran) resonates in Walker’s work, as does the saturated loneliness of Edward Hopper and the personality-rich palette of David Hockney. He considers his latest series a form of “autofiction.” A fusing of iconic and individuality, it is a concept borrowed from a music review of the honorably authentic Father John Misty. After painting en plein air for years, he now translates his skill with color and composition into narratives unique to this moment in Western history. Having traveled the world as a kid, the world now comes to him and his chosen home, an influx he reckons with on canvas. His enduring affinity for popular culture provides cues for cast and scenes, while the Tetons and the tourists they draw fill in the rest.
“Everybody has their own personal mythology that they build around the idea of the West,” Walker says. Embracing confluence, he welcomes when collectors fasten nostalgia to his paintings, when his memories intersect with theirs. Consider his treatment of classic moments from Forrest Gump, Thelma & Louise and Dirty Dancing: by his brush, familiar frames take on new freshness in the dichotomous terrain of Jackson Hole. His mythology of the American West melded with the collective memory of American pop culture makes for a limitless landscape of metaphors and meaning.
Autofiction, our exhibition of Walker’s new paintings runs from December 10 to 31 at Altamira Fine Art in Jackson, with a reception held from 4 to 7pm on Saturday, December 15.
Pre-sales are available.
For more information on his work, please contact Altamira Fine Art by email (connect@AltamiraArt.com) or phone (307-739-4700).
Artist Biography
Travis Walker is a contemporary artist whose work has appeared in The Guardian, Forbes, Southwest Art, Mountain Living, Images West, Range, Greenwich Living, Jackson Hole Magazine, and Painters of Grand Teton National Park. Travis is the founder of the nonprofit Teton Artlab, an artist residency program based in the Greater Yellowstone area. He studied Painting and Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University and the Tyler School of Art.
For the last ten years, Travis Walker has made landscape paintings about Jackson Hole, a place that never ceases to inspire him to pick up his brushes. He works on location, capturing the essence of the seemingly mundane scenes around town: a morning on the Elk Refuge, a decaying house with a fence made of skis, a vintage trailer park. His work is influenced by the work of American regionalists Edward Hopper and Grant Wood, Japanese printmaking, and German Expressionism.
