{"id":96857,"date":"2025-10-20T11:46:02","date_gmt":"2025-10-20T18:46:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=96857"},"modified":"2025-11-17T09:09:01","modified_gmt":"2025-11-17T16:09:01","slug":"jason-walker-nature-technology-and-the-space-between","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/jason-walker-nature-technology-and-the-space-between\/","title":{"rendered":"Jason Walker: Nature, Technology, and the Space Between"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Artist<\/a>

Jason Walker at work in his Cedar City studio, painting a ceramic vessel with intricate underglaze drawings that blend natural and industrial imagery. Image by Shawn Rossiter.<\/p><\/div>\n

If you happened to have visited The True and the Real<\/em> exhibition at UMOCA during the NCECA annual conference back in March, you probably came across Jason Walker\u2019s<\/a> “Trophic Cascade.” The sculpture presents a jaguar poised to launch at its prey from a tree hybridized with civic sewer works. Its stare fixes your gaze. You are dinner. Piping that should belong to that industrialized tree instead wends its way, like a harness, under and over the cat\u2019s body. Its meandering breaks the trance and leads the eye around the form, over the shoulders, round the back. A tail of flexible conduit ends as a dotted ball akin to a microphone, emerging from a bolt at a control panel at the rear. The panel, the conduit and the aforementioned piping seem more than harness, more than ornamentation. They are part of the cat itself, a machine. On one side of the jaguar, underlying and overlapping the mechanization, South American flora and fauna camouflage the feline. On the other side, exposed in the gap between the jaguar\u2019s fore and aft limbs, an airplane waits at a gate, maybe loaded, ready to push back. The vacant panes of glass, like eyes wrapping the cockpit, betray nothing about its cargo. The deserted airfield is likewise silent. Jason Walker\u2019s illustrative ceramic constructions show wilderness and civilization, nature and culture, as they are\u2014in dialogue. Simultaneously living and inert, vital and static, the central figure captures our attention. The illustrations draw us into the conversation.<\/h4>\n

It may be tempting to see the Southern Utah University professor’s juxtapositions and commingled industrial flora as a lament over the ostensible division between civilization and wilderness, but that would be a mistake. Walker\u2019s work does not moralize. It does not bemoan humanity\u2019s separation from nature. Instead, his boundary constructions present nature and technology interacting. They accept humans and their activities as part of the natural world. Walker pushes against the notion that humans and nature are separate and cannot meet. \u201cWe are not separate, because all these processes are on the planet, “natural,” in that sense.\u201d<\/h4>\n