A Walk...
Curated by Rob Teeters
June 27 – July 19, 2015
Opening reception: Saturday, June 27th, 7 – 9 pm
East Hampton, NY – Tripoli Gallery is pleased to present A Walk… curated by Rob Teeters. The exhibition includes works by Yuji Agematsu, Quentin Curry, Lucy Dodd, Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel, Ryan Estep, Bjarne Melgaard, Bruce M. Sherman, Michael E. Smith, Keith Sonnier, and Bill Walton. A Walk… will be on view at Tripoli Gallery East Hampton, 87 Newtown Lane, from June 27th through July 19th, 2015, with an opening reception Saturday, June 27th from 7 to 9 pm.
All that was human and solid seemed to be transfigured into a soul filled with gentleness. Veils of silver soul-haze swarm through all things and lay over all things. The soul of the world had opened, and I fantasized that everything wicked, distressing, and painful was on the point of vanishing. Earlier walks came before my eyes. But the wonderful image of the present swiftly became a feeling which overpowered all others. All notion of the future paled and the past dissolved. In the glowing present I myself glowed. From every direction and distance, all things great and good emerged brightly with marvelous, uplifting gestures. In the midst of this beautiful place, I thought of nothing but this place itself; all other things sank away. Attentively I looked only at what was most slight and most humble, while the heavens seemed to incline far up into the heights and down into the depths. The earth became a dream; I myself had become an inward being, and I walked as in an inward world. Everything outside of me faded to obscurity, and all I had understood till now was unintelligible. I fell away from the surface, down into the depths, which I recognized then to be all that was good.
Mysterious there prowl at the walker's heals all kinds of thoughts and notions, such as make him stand in his ardent and regardless tracks and listen, because, again and again confused by curious impressions, by spirit power, he suddenly has the bewitching feeling that he is sinking into the earth, for an abyss has opened before the dazzled, bewildered eyes of the thinker and poet. His head wants to fall off. His otherwise so lively arms and legs are benumbed. Countryside and people, sounds and colors, faces and farms, clouds and sunlight swirl all around him like diagrams; he asks himself “Where am I?"
—Robert Walser, The Walk
Originally written in 1917 by Swiss author Robert Walser (1878-1956), The Walk is a modernist novella in which a writer protagonist explores elemental truths about the human experience through a series of characters he encounters on a long, circuitous walk. Walser, a prolific writer, was greatly admired by Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, and Robert Musil, among others, but his unstable mental health led to repeated and eventually permanent psychiatric commitments from the 1920s onward, and much of his work fell into obscurity. The Walk was his first piece to appear in English, and the only work translated before his death on Christmas Day, 1956, during a solitary walk near Herisau, Switzerland.