The Armory Show 2023: Find us at booth #P29

Zoe Walsh makes elaborate, vividly saturated paintings that visually shuttle between surface and depth and imaginatively stitch together disparate temporalities. Walsh’s multifaceted compositions employ recognizable forms that invite narrative reading, yet refuse to settle, thus hovering at the edge of legibility. These paintings center the disorganizing qualities of desire and identification to allow space for unknowing, becoming, and pleasure.

Walsh’s work is frequently catalyzed by their engagement with queer archival material. These paintings draw from the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives’ holdings of filmmaker and activist Pat Rocco’s late 1960s photographs. Embarked upon without permits, Rocco staged amorous pictures with often nude men from Hollywood Boulevard to Griffith Park. Walsh recasts quotations from Rocco’s park pictures towards their current paintings which engage with the site of the public park and private garden. For this body of work, Walsh complements these archival references with gestures gathered from photoshoots that the artist and their spouse stage with friends. These photoshoots respond to Rocco’s work as well as a promiscuous genealogy of queer gesture ranging from excerpts from Henrik Olesen’s Some Faggy Gestures, to mid-century men’s physique magazines, to documentation of Yvonne Rainer dance performances.

Walsh then creates a three-dimensional digital model populated with silhouettes traced from these sources, as well as references to Southern California plants and park and garden architecture. Walsh employs this virtual model to generate renderings, which are digitally montaged, and then fragmented and transferred to silk screens used to print on canvas. Each panel has as many as 35silkscreen prints, using cyan, magenta, yellow, and burnt umber acrylic paint (a reference to the classic CMYK four-channel color space). After screen printing, Walsh adds subsequent passages of translucent color with squeegees, spatulas, and vinyl stencils. 

While this intricate layering results in an enigmatic interplay of color, texture, and depth that invites immersion, the presence of misregistration reveal the edges of screens, emphasizing the materiality of the painting and its process of physical and digital construction. These moments of interference, along with the cultural quotations which appear throughout the work, disqualify the paintings from any notion of a utopic ahistorical landscape, often the desired effect of imperialist and colonialist visual regimes. Instead, Walsh’s work pursues models of indeterminate embodiment that is shimmering, chaotic, and virtual – building a field of unruly resistances to these systems of order and control.

Come and find us at booth #P29!