What do the Brooklyn Bridge, humming birds, the Manhattan skyline, discarded lottery tickets, and New York City subway signage share in common? These are the stock images that populate the hand-torn collage multi-media art made by Jaimie Walker. 

After graduating from Pratt Institute with a BFA in Communications Design, Walker was swiftly one of the pioneering artists who made the derelict and rather dangerous neighborhood DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) her home.

Packs of wild dogs roamed the streets at night on the abandoned warehouse waterfront. Artists displaced by rising rents in Manhattan pitched in together to secure entire floors of empty buildings. What followed was a crash course in how to build kitchens, bathrooms, and group effort to shore up rotting fire escapes. On a Summer night you had three or four roof top parties to choose from. Word went round before the Internet or cell phones, about impromptu BBQ cook outs on on old docks. Concrete landings had been left to fall into the river brick by brick.
Walker was at the heart of a new generation re-inventing and re-instituting the hard earned 'Live/Work' way of life that followed in the footsteps of revolutionary artists in 70's SOHO. 

Much like that pioneer community, Walker’s collage designs and their imperfections embrace lost property, re-purposed landscapes, and objects found unwanted by the wayside. The leading roles are naturally reserved for the majestic industrial power of the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges. 

We are invited into the larger works in particular to view the panorama reserved only for the riverfront. This is where Walker's vision evolved as she created and connected with others. This is where Walker went from student to woman to established ground breaker. A journey whose snapshots and mapping of the neighborhood continue to encapsulate the ever changing skyline down by the riverside. 

'Living the Dream' (6' x 5' canvas collage and mixed media) is one of Walker's larger works and speaks plainly to what is a singularly American Pop Art concept. You could say Walker has built on the developer’s billboard invitation to 'Live, Work, Play' in Dumbo - by urging us to dream in addition. 
Live Work Play Dream. That is Walker's daily life for almost twenty years and her art tells that story. The images do not forget to reach out to that much appreciated break beyond the city limits, to bring us the humming bird, the forest creatures, a flower, or the mountain range. All in partnership with the cityscape horizon. 

The Brooklyn Bridge portraits stare out from the canvas much like an old friend or a familiar face.  Someone Walker sees every day, and still marvels at their beauty. The Dumbo waterfront is where Walker planted seeds and set down roots when the nearest way to the river was through a rusty old wire fence and a nimble walk along crumbling concrete and collapsed docks, where sparks of blades of grass pushed up through the abandoned warehouse floor framing the Belgian cobble stone. This is the foundation, the first layers that take a foothold in Walker’s collage. 

The paintings start from the ground up and like the East River itself the images ebb and flow from one to another and soon you are wading in a story of your own choosing. The eye lands on hand-drawn lettering. Part subway sign, part news clipping, part love letter or playing card? Is Walker giving us directions? 

2016 saw her first art director role in the indie feature film 'C Street' (IMDB). There are more such projects in the works. 

Walker's new canvases employ Goache, charcoal, acrylic, chalk, conte crayon, and ink as her work investigates the world around her: 'I record data, collect information, gather evidence from the streets, and put them together with my own - and found - graphic art.' 
Photography, political statements and typography are all subject to interrogation. The taping, the glueing and the layering. Everything is re-cycled into a new vista, the view seen from an entirely new angle. One moment you are looking up from the trash ridden subway rails. The next you are gazing down from a great height in tandem with Walker’s hummingbirds as they trade grooming for migration on the backs of Canadian geese. The river, the lottery ticket, the playing card, the found footage of the side walk, the cityscape, the little bird. Giant and tiny thread together. That is one individual story of the ever-changing waterfront as Walker has experienced it and the dreamscape territory her art celebrates, humbly and proudly.  
2018 will mark twenty years of Jaimie Walker showing and selling her art right here in Dumbo. 

Jan Bell, Dumbo 2017.