About the Exhibition

You Are Needed – Exhibition essay by Jessie Bryant

Ericka Walker’s lithographic prints in her series You Are Needed speak to the viewer across the decades that span early- 20th century wartime to the present day. Like a formidable call to attention, viewers are invited to come face-to-face with the series’ bold imagery, powerful imperatives, and the deeper meanings behind them.

Although Walker’s prints engage in a re-presentation of wartime propaganda posters, they veer away – in increasingly apparent ways – from mere appropriation. As we perceive the intricate depiction of a horse’s flanks or the fine details of a rocket launcher, we feel a sense of the artist’s celebratory reverence for machinery, innovation, and the lithographic craft itself. At the same time, a poignant critique of propaganda appears tangibly woven into the display of text and imagery that are juxtaposed in unsettling ways. “Victory,” reads one print, “is a question of stamina.” The word “stamina,” evoking endurance in the face of adversity, visually sinks into near-obscurity behind ocean waves. This raises the possibility of destabilizing other seemingly sturdy principles in the propaganda vernacular: honour, duty, patriotism, that which is ‘right.’ What are the meanings behind these principles? Are they foundationally sound, objective and timeless, or are they propped up by sticks, and if so, what would it take to blow them down? Walker hardly proposes a simple answer.

Binaries course through text and imagery in You Are Needed. Beyond the thematic coupling of animal and machine, violent and bucolic, and individual and institution, we discover other underlying dyads, such as that between strength and insecurity. Underneath the bold semblance of power and perfection lay tinges of vulnerability, which leaks through in words like ‘loss,’ ‘question,’ ‘demobilized’ and ‘reduced,’ and in the unusual pairings of slogans and images that invoke inquiry rather than certainty.

It is in the occasionally unexpected transaction of these timeworn texts and images that we find the freshness abundant in these works, and here we discover another binary: novelty within the familiar. In addressing, but not displaying a preference for, either aspect of these various relationships, Walker opens the floor to possibility and even nominates a potential symbiosis of both alternatives within these pairings. As it is said, the truth is never pure and rarely simple.

A final relationship to touch upon is that between past and present, as it is through the very lens of the past that these prints speak to contemporary issues. The use of familiar images and texts taps into the depth of the Western collective unconscious, providing an eerily recognizable picture with which to highlight the Jungian ‘shadow’ aspects of Western growth: imperialism and war. You Are Needed invites us to confront these remnants of our collective past and their origins that, though perhaps latent, may be still present today.

Because our past shapes our future, it is through a careful consideration of our history that we may meet current challenges and move forward conscientiously. You are needed, as the viewer, to address the urge to oversimplify complex and challenging issues, and to reconsider within yourself notions of true and false, good and evil, right and wrong.

About the Artist

Erika Walker explores the vernacular history of printmaking to illustrate contemporary relationships between the imagery of industry, national identity, familial histories, nostalgia, romance, and war. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include group and solo exhibitions in North America and Europe, and Walker’s work appears in public and private collections including the Denver Art Museum, the Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute, the University of British Columbia, and the Athens School of Fine Arts. A selection of her Iithographic propaganda prints were recently reviewed in the Spring 2012 edition of Printmaking Today. Walker received a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, and an MFA from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, USA. She currently lives and works in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, where she is an Assistant Professor of Art at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.