Alien Sex Capsule

Alien Sex Capsule, a satellite exhibition of John Walter’s ongoing Alien Sex Club, hosted in Hull, 2017. Working collaboratively with researchers and science to explores the relationship between visual culture and HIV today., Walter’s Alien Sex Capsule is formalised around the ‘cruise maze’ – a structure common to sex clubs and gay sauna.

Using the maze as a directive mechanism Walter transformed the gallery to a carnival like space filled with painting, sculptural and video in a multimedia, multi-sensory and immersive show converging conversation and scientific bodies of research with the complex subject of contemporary sexual health today.

”Around 2012 I began to apply my maximalist approach to the subject of HIV in what became Alien Sex Club (2015). ASC addressed HIV as a crisis of representation and challenged the predominantly 'Queer Minimalist' genre that has been used to address the subject from Felix Gonzalez-Torres onwards. Holism characterises my thinking. My deepened interest in viruses has lead me to work firstly with Professor Alison Rodger on ASC and subsequently with Professor Greg Towers and his lab on CAPSID (2018), which addressed the virus as a nanomachine instead of a social problem. Collaboration has become a scaling-up of my matryoska-like artistic practice to an interdisciplinary scale.

My work begins as a visual diary, which rapidly gives way to a form of autoethnographic painting; I create pictorial fictions that conflate my personal narratives with the voices of others. Images and phrases gathered in books become the building blocks for surreal hybrids, which then become scaffolding for larger drawn compositions, then paintings, videos and ultimately installations. My early work was concerned with painting and although I now work across a diverse range of media that includes artist’s books, sculpture, print-making, animation, moving image and Virtual Reality the way in which I use these media to interrogate my subjects is still fundamentally pictorial. I build space out of colour, gesture and line in a way that is distinct from sculptural, architectural or cinematic space.”

To find out more: http://www.aliensexclub.com/

About the Artist

John Walter (b. Dartford, 1978) is a visual artist working across a diverse range of media including painting, moving image, installation and curating. He studied at Chelsea School of Art and Design, The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, The Slade School of Fine Art and undertook his doctoral studies at The University of Westminster graduating in 2017. In 2006 he was artist in residence at KIAC in Dawson City, Canada. Between 2006-8 he was Sainsbury Scholar at The British School at Rome. He was a participant in Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2012. In 2017 he undertook a residency at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop. Wellcome and Arts Council England have supported his work. He was awarded the 2016 Hayward Curatorial Open for Shonky: The Aesthetics of Awkwardness. The Arts Council Collection and The Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool have collected his work. Recent exhibitions include: Brexit Gothic (DKUK, 2019); Crep Suzette - A Shoe Show (with Bert McLean, LUVA, 2019); The Fourth Wall (Look Again Festival Aberdeen, 2019); Booze Guitar (Matt’s Gallery, 2018); CAPSID (CGP and HOME, 2018); Somewhere in Between (Wellcome Collection, 2018); Coming Out: Sexuality, Gender and Identity (Walker Art Gallery, 2017); The Zany Capsid (Hardwick Gallery, 2017).

Website: http://johnwalter.net/home/index.html