The resulting panels oscillate between illusionism and flatness, as each 10-foot canvas appears to be at once a brick wall and a variation of an abstract grid. Between the gaps, glossy pages stand in as the “mortar” and seem to emerge from behind the bricks, when in fact they are pasted on top of the canvas surface. Walker’s cycle of twelve works corresponds to the publication’s twelve monthly issues, as each painting draws from one issue of Domus magazine.

The exhibition, then, creates a methodical timeline that spans the entire year of 2012, where each painting acts as an indexical temporal marker and a self-referential brick wall. Walker observed, “I think of the canvas as having a mimetic relationship not only to the wall the work might be displayed on, but also to the structure of the bricks and cinder blocks in the urban cityscape of New York. Outside my studio window, I see various ways these building materials are used – structurally as well as decoratively, stacked both horizontally and vertically” (Kelley Walker, ibid, p. 76).