The phrase emerging artist means what people want it to mean, but only for them. Like a couple who enter a revolving door together but wind up on different streets, we each summon to mind different images.
Does it mean an artist who scores her first gallery show? (Tell it to Carmen Herrera.) How about someone who after years of toiling in a regional setting breaks onto a global stage? Maybe it’s someone who finally connects meaning to matter after a prelude of dilly-dallying. Is it someone whose sales tip over into something close to a living wage or someone who can pass as a discovery for critics?
Artists who find a style and stick with it for decades can still be called emerging when they manage to attract an audience. In other minds, however, those same artists might never rise to the level of emerging. They’ve broken through nothing.
Brett Walker takes his lead from the brown burrowing mole. If he emerges into your yard, you’ll know it. Walker is part of Rattle My Cage at Vermillion Gallery, through Jan. 3.
The Emerging Artist, 2009
Is that beard part of his mole costume? His whitey-white shoulders give him away as NOT A MOLE.
Milly. Time to get out of that class you’re taking at the College of Literalism.
Ellen. Kidding. There are no literalists reading this blog. It might kill them.
No literalists and nobody interested in logic either. Regina’s all over the place. That’s why she calls herself a bouncing ball.
Hey Ed. I object. I can get from A to B and back again.
Instead of commenting on the artist’s body (Christ!) or Regina’s career as an eccentric art critic (obvious), how about a comment or two on the photo? It rocks the house. I’ve never tried to emerge, but if I do, I hope to leave heaps of dirt around me.
The only thing larger than that fat man’s beard is his annoying ego.
Hey R is for Rad. You’re not.