| Dancing in the Dark: Aljira Emerge - Calvin Reid |
| Walters's dreamy oil paintings offer depictions of open stage-like pictorial spaces filled with an oddly affecting procession of Gumby-like animal figures. These figures resemble hybrid combinations of Bambi, Pluto, and Lambchip and offer both the vulnerability and comic effect of similar characters from a host of classic animated films. She builds these affecting animal figures herself out of clay and paints their toy-like forms into the painting's mysterious and garishly illuminated proscenium-like spaces. Gaudily lit and painted with a rich metallic sheen and glassy, high-gloss surface, the pictorial spaces and animal figures invoke a mediated sense of fragility, attentiveness, and comic adorability. With notable facility, her paintings extract this carefully observed emotional anthropomorphism, shrewdly offering an abstract strain of pop sentimentality in a succession of painterly hybrid forms. |
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