Artist Statement
Connor Walden is a conceptual artist from Dallas, Texas, and is currently completing a graduate degree at the University of Washington in Three-dimensional Forum (3D4M). His work focuses on the social and spiritual constructs of belief and its affects on the American political, social, and personal landscapes. Connor utilizes performance, sculpture, installation, social practice, collaboration, and other media to expand the examination into provocative experience. Recently, his work incorporates steel and knitted yarn to examine the relationship between pain and healing, hard and soft, light and heavy. Soft and bold colors, forms, and materials challenge preconceived notions of gender, intimacy, strength, and power.
The audience plays an integral role in his work. The work is not fully realized until activated by the audience in context. The audience’s engagement with the work ranges from roles of participation, observation, contemplation, conversation, consternation, and alleviation. A play of sincerity and irony complicate initial assumptions and suspicions to be questioned further by the audience. The co-creation of the work with the artist, audience, and context exposes the subtleties and nuances of interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships as a result of mood, attention, personality, and ideology.
Education
- Master of Fine Arts, University of Washington, Seattle
- Bachelor of Business Administration, The University of Texas at Austin
- Bachelor of Arts, The University of Texas at Austin
Exhibitions
- 2019, Cobblestones and Lumber, SFAI – Fort Mason Campus, San Francisco, CA
- 2019, Surplused, Surplus Store at UW, Seattle, WA
- 2018, 10 Études for Summer, Jacob Lawrence Gallery, Seattle, WA
- 2018, Relic en Route, Side Note Gallery, Seattle, WA
- 2017, Teeter, Visual Arts Center, Austin, TX
Committee Members
- Doug Jeck, Committee Chair (3D4M)
- Scott Magelssen (Drama)
- Amie McNeel (3D4M)
- Adair Rounthwaite (Art History)
- Michael Swaine (3D4M)
