What if the sky was on the ground, and we looked down instead of up? But then what happens to the ground? If it's on the same level as the sky, perhaps our perceptions of both could shift.
In St. Louis-based artist Kahlil Robert Irving's exhibition "Archaeology of the Present" at the Walker Art Center, visitors are greeted with a raised wooden platform with various sculptures popping out of it. There's a large black-painted ceramic cylindrical shape that visitors can touch but not enter. There are squares and rectangles of ceramic tiles with various detritus baked into them. On a two-channel video, there's footage of a city street on one screen and the sky on the other.
"The installation at the Walker overall relates to theater," Irving said. "Instead of theater being something that you sit and look at, this has a bit more of an experiential opportunity for the viewer."
The performative nature occurs because people have to enter into the platform and interact in the space with the art, and maybe even with one another.
"The emphasis on physical experience is kind of the driving force," Walker Curatorial Assistant William Hernández Luege said. "There is a way in which we're not hand-holding the experience of the work but instead creating this structure that guides the way in which you interact."
Irving's practice focuses on everyday objects that he re-creates and recontextualizes in the studio. He works primarily in ceramics and aims to challenge Western cultural ideas while calling attention to the ways that the lived experiences of race and class are embedded into oppressive systems of control.
Last year, he had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that focused on the internet as a living archive of everyday Black life, death, survival and more. But for his Walker show, he wants to keep viewers in the present.
"I'm dealing with real stuff," Irving said. "I'm not trying to fool people by the coincidental nature or the intentional representation of something. … It relates to the stuff that's right here with us right now."