Publishes,

Interview with Trent Walker,

“Portrait”
Trent Walter

Dates: 20 Jul – 6 Aug 2016
Bus Projects

(Music by ‘White Squirrel’ by Scrapple. Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…)

‘Portrait’ is an interview-based work in which I have asked interviewees to describe a significant person in their lives in the third person (he/she, him/her) and in past tense. By editing together these fragments of multiple identities, a unique narrative is constructed that operates like fiction while being grounded in lived experience: the interviewees are not actors, yet the narrative compiled in Portrait belongs more to narrative fiction than it does to documentary. While Portrait is edited to represent a single identity, its character is Janus-faced looking both forward and backward through time: simultaneously young and old. The subject of Portrait may be elusive, but the emotional connection to them is palpable based on the interviewee’s testimony.

Trent Walter is an artist, printer and publisher interested in the intersection of contemporary art and printed matter. In his artwork, Walter combines multiple readymade sources (textual, pictorial and/or sculptural) to form alternative narratives that comment on identity, history and culture more broadly. He was joint recipient, with Brook Andrew, of the 2013–14 Georges Mora Foundation Fellowship, for the project Dual/Duel.