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Antenna Space
梦想乡Ruritania. Shanghai, China

展期：2024.5.24-2024.7.18

塔拉·沃尔特斯 Tara Walters

(b.1990, Washington) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her bachelor's degree from Savannah College of Art and Design and her Master's degree from Pasadena College of Art and Design. Tara Walters blends paint with the water of the Pacific Ocean. Tara Walters’ paintings have a dreamlike quality that may be related to her tendency for bright colors to punctuate lovely flora and fauna, and natural landscapes too. The rebellion of utilizing unprimed canvases allows the softness and gentleness to saturate the canvas and then permeate everyone’s mind, creating surrealistic visions. Walters informally refers to this misty and ethereal body of work as her “future-telling paintings”, a gentle visual reminder that images are of the soul and spirit rather than of the earth. By building a gateway to the realm of consciousness, Walters believes that art can, in some moments, give space to place the doubts needed to believe in something intangible and metaphysical. Walters’ paintings combine swelling movement and transparency, optical effects that mirror her interest in celestial bodies, prismatic auras, and other sublime and romantic visions. Recent works depict gardens, secret gates (with skeleton keys), hot air balloons, but terflies, and hidden woodland creatures, imagery that is fantastic, magic and symbolic.

“Ruritania” originates from a fictional country in Anthony Hope(1863-1933)’s novel, the way Tara sees it, “Ruritania” is a visional world ask her to render it. The following conversation comes from a meeting between Tara Walters and Malibu Shaman Stoyana P. C. Ht. about the exhibition, retracing the artist’s intimate spiritual connection with medium and her works under the

guidance of tarot.

Psychic Reading Conversation:

for Ruritania: Tara Walters in Conversation with Stoyana P. C. Ht.,
Malibu Shaman, Malibu, CA
February, 22, 2024, 6:00 pm PST as interpreted by Nora Mapp

Tara: I want to talk about the new paintings for the show with you today. Let’s start with the Clairs* (seeing, hearing, feeling), what are you hearing from the paintings? Are you picking anything up?

Stoyana: One second, let me burn some sage in the reading room. Someone lit a yankee candle in here earlier and I have to get the smell out~~~ Thanks for your patience. Ok, yes, I’m hearing from your teammates.

Tara: You mean the animals?

Stoyana: No, it’s the colors that are part of your team and the way you set up the show, with one

room leading to the next, the team journeys through day into night.

Tara: I think I had to grow up in the last year. Not everything is magical. I just want to get this gunk [energy] from the last year away so that I can listen and paint and hear.

Stoyana: It does feel like a transformation. I’m looking at this one with the red pandas. It feels like the work is a little older. There is something coming across as transitional. There’s a heaviness, an opposition that I haven’t seen in the work before. And you’re doing it. The message I’m getting is yeah, you got it right.

Tara: You know a lot of that painting was just looking and making sure I was doing what, early in my practice, was the most difficult, looking and listening to my painting. Really pulling out and taking chances and stopping as soon as I hear that I have to stop. And then going really detailed, like, in the little panda areas. I feel like a lot of times painting is a metaphor or resemblance to life around you or life for everybody. Especially as a young artist, we just have to take the leap and trust in what we feel and what we know and what we do. Because anything else is just an over-painted painting. How do we just paint a good painting? You just listen, and you paint.

Stoyana: It feels like those pandas led to a lot of these other pieces being let out.

Tara: Yes! I was working on this one with the horse today. And my mom saw it in the studio and said, “this horse is so mad!” And she was right, its eyes are angry, it’s mad and it’s kicking. And she said, “it’s kicking a bunny at the edge of the painting.” Do you see that kind of green [yellow] blob [form] at the edge? I'm like, ok, I guess I’ll pull the bunny out and define it. And last year was such a rough year for me and it was the year of the bunny.

Stoyana: Were you born in the year of the rabbit?

Tara: No, I am a horse. I am a horse kicking the bunny away.

——

Stoyana: Let’s take out the decks now but I’d like you to read them. I know you use it as atool for yourself and your practice. I’ll ask some questions but I think it would be helpful if you read the cards tonight.

Tara: Ok. I brought my two favorite decks. Dame Darcy’s Mermaid Deck and the Belline Oracle. I usually like to check in with both.

Stoyana：What is this place Ruritania that you’ve pictured?

Tara: [shuffling] It’s a place where you can go away and escape. Yeah, it’s the Temperance card, so it’s a place to pause and examine what’s important to you. It’s also a place to escape to when feeling extremely sad. This is the Nine of Swords. This is a very sad card, as if everything in your life is a burden and disaster. And the Swords, they’re your thoughts, and so Ruritania is a place to escape thoughts. But it's also where you can fallback in love, here are The Lovers, not only with others but with yourself. So it’s a retreat you go to when you’re feeling like shit and can fallback in love with yourself!

Stoyana: What does Belline have to say about Ruritania?

Tara: [shuffling] Ah, yeah– it’s home. It’s the garden. It’s where you elevate. This is the card of elevation. Yeah, it’s where you learn how to be more graceful and you can then go back and have a new viewpoint on life.

——

Stoyana：Ok, that leads me to the next question. I’m looking at the frame of the window around the dog and this vase of flowers in this tall painting. Tell me about Matisse.

Tara: It’s like the first knowing. Ace of Swords. It’s also the beginning of learning something new and then, here, I see an initiative. When I was visiting my family in December, I went to the National Gallery of Art the way I did all the time as a kid and I felt the initiative to paint more like my horses.

Stoyana: What does that mean? To paint like your horses?

Tara: My horses: Rothko, Míro, Matisse, Morisot. Their mother was Cessna. Horses are always named with the same first letter as their sire, so that everyone knows where they’re from. My first M baby was Míro and a lot of my early work was about him but when I went to visit in the fall, I realized it was Matisse I needed to bring closer. I didn’t have a strong connection with him, I didn’t have such a strong connection with the painter when he was born, but he was Matisse. I started working on this show in the fall of 2023, around the same time that I realized I needed to bring Matisse here, to California. I kept thinking, how can I bring Matisse closer? It started subconsciously but now I’m actively conjuring him through the paintings.

Stoyana：Looking over your shoulder, I think that Belline is saying that this is the first love, the base knowing, this is the thing you wanted to do more than anything else in your life. Do you think it means taking care of your horse or being an artist?

Tara: Both. They’re both Matisse.

Stoyana: The Devil card, the dream card (Seven of Cups), Justice and the Magician card.

Tara: Yes, I’ve had to become the magician, or rather the witch. It was actually a perspective shift that allowed me to let Matisse in.

Stoyana: What kind of perspective shift? What needed to change? Let’s focus on that with Belline.

Tara:[shuffling] There are two sets of cards. This card is basically like a sadness that needs to be healed and the other set brings healing through Justice. Reading the cards is almost like painting, I think that's why I find it so useful.

Stoyana：What do you mean? How are they similar?

Tara: I always begin each painting by creating a wash of water and color on the front, then flipping the canvas over to create an imprint of the ground. An old surrealist technique I discovered a few years ago after reading Andre Breton and Tristan Tzara called Decalcomania. When I pull the painting up from the floor’s surface I begin to see forms which allow me to dream.

Stoyana: So the imprints tell you what the painting needs to be?

Tara: Yes. Looking back at the cards, I see this constriction or sickness. At the time, I was having difficulties listening to the paintings for a lot of reasons, personal stuff, or gunk as I called it, that was following me into the studio each day. I couldn’t dream but I kept applying water washes and eventually layers of color built into atmospheres.

Stoyana: The colors got through to you? And told you what they needed to be

Tara: Yes! I began to see the Phoenix sitting proud on the mountain with colors surrounding her spirit. I noticed a form of a horse head flying through the sky which led me to see Pegasus creating the Hippocrene at Mt Helicon, a fountain believed to be the source of poetic inspiration. I also began to see the three flowers which led to the discovery of the a Taoist concept, “Three Flowers Condensing onto the Head” which refers to an advanced state in Inner Alchemy where essence, breath, and spirit unify in the brain.

Stoyana: You see, the colors are your teammates.

Tara: I believe the paintings want me to make them. I just act in service by uncovering the messages that are hidden. The Decalcomania method is the driving force within my work. This is the real Ruritania. It’s a place that wanted me to find it. This group of paintings shows a place that asked me to render it.

Stoyana: That feels right and what I felt in the beginning about transition has only begun and it has to do with listening. I think you’re starting to trust the messages more, and to trust that others can read the messages too.