April Banks: Tidewalker, 2024
Location: SLOMA Public Art Platform
Exhibition Dates: April 2024 to April 2025
Tidewalker is a corten steel flora fauna creature that holds a resin soul cabana inside (spirit house) and inverts the colonial hierarchy between nature and the built environment. Banks plays with scale to highlight our interdependence to nature, presenting an interspecies safehold to transport us to more caring possibilities. Visitors experience the sculpture as an enveloping protector of land and laborers, offering a refuge for people and species. This sculpture is a part of the artist’s ongoing series Freedom is a Place which uses radical imagination to rethink our relationship to water, to land, and to each other. Banks’ practice sits intentionally between image, space, and experience. Time-traveling through historical archives and memories, her recent work questions what we think we know of the past and how it informs our cultural positioning, systems, and future identities. From encaustic to public sculpture, she uses the language of pattern, text, and symbols to examine place and amplify lesser-known stories while creating alternate narratives for the erased and intentionally forgotten.
This project is supported by the City of San Luis Obispo’s Public Art Program and the National Endowment for the Arts.