Sleepwalkers: Walker and Walker, The Owl of Minerva - Hugh Lane Gallery

Irish artists Walker and Walker work in a wide range of forms and media, encompassing film, sculpture, drawing and installation; their practice primarily explores the elusiveness of language. The artists also take inspiration from a variety of 19th and 20th Century Surrealist artists, writers and poets in their work from Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) to René Daumal (1908-44). By re-evaluating their meaning and lyrical structure in their works, the words become independent from their original signifier and enforce new ideas through the variety of mediums and the carefully selected locations to display each work. In 2012, as we were transitioning from Golden Bough to the Sleepwalkers programme we launched ‘Sleepwalkers: Possibilities – Contingencies’. Jesse Jones and the artist duo Walker and Walker were invited to present some of their previous work to fill this liminal setting.

The exhibition was titled, ‘The Owl of Minerva’ taking inspiration from the 19th Century German idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831): “The Owl of Minerva spreads its wings with the falling of the dusk.” In Gallery 10 perched high above the space, a taxidermy owl sat echoing this quote. In the adjoining room there was the in the screening of their film ‘Mount Analogue Revisited’ (2010). The film was a reworking of French Surrealist writer René Daumal’s unfinished book ‘Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing’ (published 1952). The book tells the story of a voyage to an unknown island, where the voyagers seek an improbable mountain which is seen as a means to link Heaven and Earth. Walker and Walker take as a starting point for their film, a short passage from the book, where upon the boat’s arrival at the shores of an island, fabricate a conversation between three of the crew members, the official and the author himself. Although the film holds true to the book, it is not a literal adaptation, but also includes many references from other writers such as Polish science fiction and philosophy writer Stanislaw Lem (1921-2006) to American writer and poet Edger Allen Poe (1809-49).

Mounted on the gallery wall were a series of prepositions and conjunctives; ‘if’, ‘or’, ‘do’, ‘is’, ‘to’, the centre of each of these words were cut out in sheet aluminium and from first glance they appear as small abstract sculptures. The artists created the negative space that existed between these letters, opening out the possibility of an understanding of these words; if only this had happened as opposed to that, to take action or not, to go here or there. ‘One Night Only’ (2008) was a neon sign of the same wording, which was on for the exact duration of one night only while on display in the exhibition.

Profile

Joe Walker and Pat Walker are twin brothers who have been collaborating since 1989. They co-represented Ireland at the 51st International Venice Biennale in 2005 and have exhibited widely nationally and internationally. Their work is research driven and diverse in its range of materials, methods and references. The film ‘Mount Analogue Revisited’ screened internationally an LA; San Francisco; Berlin; Dublin; and Rio de Janeiro was listed one of the best films of 2010 by notable Australian film journal Senses of Cinema. Their first solo exhibition at IMMA was in 2019 entitled ‘Nowhere without no(w)’. The exhibition showcased a number of pre-existing works from the artists’ extensive 30 year career.
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Unfilmed Mountain by Fergus Daly