Fellows’ Exhibition: Agnes Walden
Poultice
Opening:  Friday, April 5, 2024 from 5 to 8 PM

On View: April 5-15, 2024
Hudson D. Walker Gallery

Writer Maxi Wallenhorst describes how “[t]he figure of the trans woman supposedly  encapsulates a kind of dissociated knowledge that is knowledge not for her but for other people.” If reductive allegories must be the inheritance of trans women artists, then the allegorical gesture can be refashioned to our own ends. My recent works depict women in invented allegorical scenes. One figure chisels at a fossil between her legs; another figure keeps a fountain circulating with the help of her friends. Even as I reveal these women, I am unsure whether their image belongs to me, but paint is the means through which I assert knowledge that is mine, an expertise in and of my body. If her image is for other people, it is nonetheless made of my time and choreography. I am so reluctant to confess my pessimism when paint is so lovely to touch. These figures’ contortions and constricted movements feel vulnerable to me so I use the only tools I have to steal their time back from you, the viewer. An aggressive and dynamic formal vocabulary takes sensory primacy over the image.  Accumulation and subtraction. Clumsy metaphors work hard but my body works harder and is clumsier.

Please note: The gallery is available to visit from Monday to Friday from 9 am to 5 pm. Please visit the administrative offices to be shown to the gallery.

About the Artist

Agnes Walden is a painter concerned with transgender subjectivities and the ways in which attempts to describe trans life are conditioned by allegory. Recent solo exhibitions include Aurora Consurgens at Launch F18 in New York, Favors at An Sylvia Exhibitions in Chicago, and Laundry Day at AMFM Gallery in Chicago. Her paintings and writing have been featured in publications such as New American PaintingsASAP/Journal, and Saatchi Art’s 2021 Rising Stars Report. In 2020, Walden received a grant from The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation. She holds an MFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design and a BA in Studio Art from Colorado College. She has taught as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Drawing at Rhode Island School of Design and as a high school art teacher at The Dalton School. Walden lives and works in New York.

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