February 12 – May 2, 2026

RYAN LEE is pleased to announce outside repetition (reprise), a video installation by Richard T. Walker that explores the impossibility of desire and the complicated connection between humans and nature.
 
Presented in RLWindow, the video depicts the artist jumping on a trampoline in the desert near the Sierra Nevadas as he attempts to touch a peak in the distance. The action is framed by an image of the trampoline that Walker used in the video.

Rooted in – yet departing from – the tradition of land art, Walker’s practice prods the vulnerability of the landscape and the limitations of media, and also challenges the viewer’s perception of these majestic locations and depictions. He sets himself the Sisyphean task of attempting, over and over, to achieve an impossible goal. The absurdity of the action lends the work a sense of humor and play. Walker says, “The mountain’s summit is in many ways an unattainable place that only exists in distance. A perpetual ‘over there’ that amplifies the ‘in here’ that we carry with us as singular human beings.”
 
For much of the video, Walker’s body is suspended in midair as he tries to defy physics and bridge the space between body and land. When jumping, one is neither in the body or in the land but rather inhabiting an in-between space: the space of desire. Because Walker isn’t in either place, he could conceivably be in both places, finally achieving oneness with nature.

Richard T. Walker’s videos, installations, photographs, and performances court serendipitous chance and reflect formal systems in equal measure. His projections, sculptures, and audio works begin from an instance of happenstance or even failure that serves as a guidepost and sets a course of actions for him to take in the studio. Using scenes and objects from the natural world, he employs technological, visual and auditory slippages to break apart, investigate, and manipulate these seemingly impenetrable images while still keeping them whole.
 
His work is held in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Kadist Foundation, San Francisco and Paris; and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (K21), Dusseldorf, Germany, among others. He has exhibited and performed world wide, including solo and group exhibitions at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, CA; The Contemporary Austin, TX; The Times Museum, Guangzhou, China; The Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan; and Witte De With Center for Contemporary Art, Netherlands, among other venues. Walker has been an Irvine Fellow at the Montalvo Art Center and a resident at The Headlands Center for the Arts and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He received an Artadia Award in 2009. In 2025, he was among the recipients of the distinguished Guggenheim Fellowship