15ème Biennale Internationale de l’image
Gérard Louis Editeur, Nancy, France, 2008

The photographs that comprise the exhibition Color is Power collectively represent an implicit critique of consumer society and the prodigious production of advertising imagery directed at the hearts and minds of the citizenry. By using fragmentation and creating a raucous visual quilt, Robert Walker subverts the original advertising messages by abrupt “edits”, reassembling the fragments in incongruous ways which propose new, unintended meanings. Walker juxtaposes spatial planes, confuses us with foregrounds that don’t seem to “agree” with the background, and vice versa. Tragically, he shows us how citizens in these crowded spaces seem incidental, having to struggle to occupy even a minimum of sufficient living space. Worse, a trend is clear: however glamorous on the surface, is increasingly a substitute for real life.