Photographer's exhibit closes

Artist James Walker flips through journals that are the beginning of his artistic process. Walker has combined photography, drawing and painting to make pieces that have been showing at the Ingham Chapman Gallery in UNM-Gallup's Gurley Hall. The show ends Friday with a closing reception and lecture today at 6 p.m. in the gallery. [Photo by John A. Bowersmith/Independent]

Pamela G. Dempsey
Staff Writer

GALLUP — What some people may see as morbid, artist James Walker sees as hope.

His exhibit, "Disintegration," closes today at the University of New Mexico-Gallup with a reception and a lecture.

Walker's work isn't what you'd call typical.

Photos of dog skulls, some smeared with blood, are what grace the pages of a collection of journals he has worked on during the past nine years.

It's from these journals that Walker created the larger pieces hanging in UNM's Ingham Chapman Gallery.

"When working with the journals, I try not to think of them as pieces people are going to see," said Walker. "Everything is basically snippets of day-to-day life with as little pretension as possible."

Walker's journals contain memos, letters, and candid photos of friends and girlfriends.

"This is a way to envelope as much as possible every second of every day," he said. "It enables me to notice things more thoroughly."

Walker created his first journal in 1997 as an art student at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

They became a way for him to materialize his ideas, he said.

The idea behind his work was to personalize the sterile process of photography, Walker said.

"I wanted to turn it into a unique object," Walker said.

His journals, he said, are not a way to preserve, but a way to celebrate entropy.

"Nothing ever really disintegrates," Walker said. "In some form or another, things breaking down and re-textualizing into something else."

This is one of the reasons he chose to conceptualize death through his photos using found objects such as dog bones and skulls. Walker does not use human blood or bones in his work and the objects he does use are found on the ground.

"Skulls, blood, dead things if you really look at it ... some interpret as morbid, but it's nice to look at it and get a sense of hope," Walker said. "In the end, there's an underlining sense of inherent good."

The 27-year old now teaches art at the Miami Dade College in Florida, and also photographs commercially with his girlfriend and fellow photographer Allison Knight.

Walker's work has been shown in Washington D.C., Savannah, Georgia, and Paris, France.

This is his first show in Gallup.

His close friend local photographer Craig Robinson initiated and installed Walker's show at UNM.

"No one knows more about my work than Craig," Walker said.

"Disintegration" will close tonight at the University of New Mexico-Gallup's Ingham Chapman Gallery with a reception at 6 p.m. Walker and Robinson will give a lecture about the work.