DAVE WALSH - STEREOGRAPH

A stereograph is a pair of images, depicting left-eye and right-eye views of the same scene, as a single three-dimensional image when viewed in a stereoscope.  Historically used as a way for people to see landmarks and landscapes without the need to visit. These images emphasised the natural beauty of the “untouched” lands while bolstering the erasure of their dark past.

In this show, Walsh doubles, triples, or pairs vistas of Yosemite and Mariposa Grove to produce a more in-depth cultural understanding of American Landscape mythologies. Initially granted as protected wilderness areas by Abraham Lincoln, these were some of the  first sites in United States history designated for public use and preservation. Protected in the wake of the country’s civil war and the forced removal of the indigenous Ahwahneechee people, these parks began to perpetuate the American mythologies of wilderness, manifest destiny, and frontierism. By repeating and juxtaposing views, like a stereograph, Walsh is shifting the focus on these sites from mere scenery towards acknowledging history. 

Walsh views landscape as a cultural form that holds the weight of history and the present in the same space—a space that accounts for the violence of nation-building, extraction of resources and the manipulation of land into scenery. Seeking a responsible relationship to the land he was born into, Walsh explores the effects and outcomes these ideologies have had on the land and the nation. His process begins with fieldwork in national parks and recreation areas where the landscape mythologies are present in the architecture and built environment.

The works reflect a bodily experience of space where memory informs the scale and distance of objects, resulting in multiple horizons, floating and fragmenting into groundlessness. By pushing the background to the foreground, Walsh challenges the pictorial hierarchy of landscape painting and the viewer’s relationship to it. 

The paintings expand beyond the borders of a postcard or snapshot and include imagery of parking lots, signs, and architecture. Pulling from field notes, drawings, and photographs, Walsh forms new revelations in his paintings between memory and history. Replacing historical landscape conventions, through experiential understanding, Walsh manipulates commonplace perceptions of iconic landscapes and mythological symbolism as represented in American National Parks.