Walk Ways Parades Moving Metaphors

Walk Ways

At the Surrey Art Gallery until November 21

If you can, walk into Walk Ways. Walk through the front doors of the Surrey Arts Centre, up the ramp leading to the gallery, and into the exhibition halls. Walk to and through and around the artworks on display. It's impossible to encounter this show without becoming mindful of your own walking, without being newly aware of this most marvellously quotidian of human acts, this miraculous getting from place to place to place.

Walk Ways is an engaging exhibition that examines walking as creative activity, as means, mark, and metaphor. A touring survey of some two dozen works by 19 contemporary artists from the United States, Canada, Mexico, Italy, and Great Britain, it compasses many dates (from 1969 to 2001), media (sculpture, installation, drawing, video, photography, text, and performance), and approaches (including mail art, conceptualism, and interactivity). Idea-driven works predominate.

Some of the walking undertaken in this show is meditative. Some is political. Some is humorous. Some of it is done alone, and some in the company of dogs or children or noisy crowds of strangers. Mowry Baden proposes walking with a cane that creates wolf footprints, complicating the human ones and creating evidence of an intrigue of predator and prey. Franí§ois Morelli walks in remembrance of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, with a hideously burned and twisted torso, sculpted in fibreglass, strapped to his back. Tom Marioni walks back and forth in his studio with coloured pencils attached to his waist, drawing his unconsciously undulating and amazingly consistent movements in a multicoloured wave across a long sheet of paper. Francis Alí¿ss walks the streets of Mexico City, leaving a strand of his unravelling blue sweater behind him.

In a subtle act of protest, Eleanor Antin sets out marching lines, circles, and squadrons of black rubber boots, in urban and rural settings across the continental U.S.A. Rudolf Stingel constructs a thick platform of Styrofoam, then walks over it in acetone-soaked boots, the acetone dissolving the Styrofoam and "etching" his footprints deep into his monochrome surface, his patch of snowy ground, his little plot of moon dust.

The white-on-white footprints in Stingel's untitled piece echo the footprints in snow in Sharon Harper's lyrical, overlapping black-and-white photographs, titled Walkabout (Figment), in which a woman and a young girl trek across a winter landscape, and out of view. The footprints resonate, too, in the sounds and sights of a brisk walk--a jog, really--up a snowy hill in Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's video, Hillclimbing. As you would expect from Cardiff and Miller, the work is highly attuned to the audio environment. An excited dog, licence tags jingling, dashes from the bottom of a hill to the crest, while an unseen man holds the video camera and labours upward after it, boots crunching in the snow. He pants, falls, grunts, his companion laughs and calls out to him, he responds, gets up, spits out snow, and the action loops back to the bottom of the hill again. And again. And again. It's like the Zen of Sisyphus, a kind of walking meditation on the human condition.

A more anguished eternity of walking is compressed into Nancy Spero's Vietnamese Women. Here, the single image of an elderly woman, abstracted from a news photo of villagers fleeing the 1968 My Lai massacre, is repeated over and over, handprinted in different colours, opacities, and angles across a friezelike, horizontal band of paper. The repetition of her striding image creates both a sense of momentum and a shifting, ghostly crowd out of an individual experience. This woman is witness to an unspeakable act of violence--and to all such unspeakable acts. There's something relentless in her march across the long page of history: she is like the spectre of all wars, past, present, and future. And you are walking along beside her.

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