"Transit Section IV," by Sarah Walker (2002).

"What I'm really after is a state of visual and perceptive ecstasy," Walker said. "I want to be hypnotized, to be totally absorbed by my work. It's maniacal what complete joy it gives me. It taps into an obsession I have, and until it has that buzz, I can't stop."

What Walker refers to as her "addiction" could also be described as a meticulous dedication to pushing the boundaries of perception, using pools of wet acrylic paint and distinct lines and shapes. "I'm looking to construct paintings that are a simultaneous compression of the past, present and future," said Walker, who is polished but casual and pretty without makeup, and speaks with a passionate and articulate command of her work. "I'm visualizing the reality of our existence being in many spaces at once."

Those many spaces include the space we occupy mentally, physically and even technologically, said Walker, who is fascinated by the social context of the internet age and explores the notion of where we are and what it looks like when we're surfing the web.

Walker aims to depict those seemingly separate spaces we occupy on a daily basis all at once, re-examining separate perspectives by fusing them. It sounds intense because it is. Her ideas are philosophically complex (perhaps it should be noted that her mother was an artist, too, and her father a neuroscientist). But her work is also intensely stimulating on a strictly visual level.

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Walker's paintings are comprised of vivid lines, dozens of vibrant layers (as many as 40 in pieces like "Grain Boundary") crystalline-like designs, multi-sized orbs, geometric and mosaic-like fragments, and small clusters of ornate detail. What she has created can evoke anything from the contents of petri dishes, endless matrices, violent hurricanes, floating debris and more.

And they are all unmistakably hers. Relentlessly handmade, yet without a trace of a brush stroke, Walker's work is rife with contrast. Portions from a series that was inspired by catastrophe seem both fast and slow, chaotic but geometrically contained. And Walker encourages the sense of confusion in her work that such dichotomy breeds.

"I don't want there to be a sense of space that we're used to," Walker said of her work. "I want it to seem like it at first, but then the longer you look at it, the more it falls apart."

As such, much of her work has a sense of being vast yet collapsed--like an exploding star and a black hole. Without the constraints of representative form, one painting might look like it could belong either under a microscope or stretching infinitely across a galaxy.

And the concept of infinity has a place in Walker's approach, as she blends spaces and states of being while obliterating the idea of linear time. "I'm looking to build paintings that aren't representative of things, nor are they about something, nor are they a comment on something," Walker said. "I am hoping to create a useful visual tool that can reorganize perception around different qualities or means of digesting information, like a vitamin or a solvent, a visual enzyme for metabolizing complexity."

Indeed Walker speaks of her work as though it is to be ingested. The densest portions of her paintings draw then anchor the eye, and she affectionately calls them, "jewel-like super-chunks of saturated little information molecules."

In explaining a technique in which she wipes partially-dry paint from her paper with a sponge, Walker refers to the "residual crust" left behind, like she's talking about a gourmet pie. Rightly so. Walker's paintings are like mind candy, and they pack a powerful visual punch.

The notion of "information density," has long driven her approach. Even as a child, Walker drew intricate patterns while the other children at school stuck to depictions of their families and pets. "Sometimes artists emerge as who they are very early on," Walker said. "It's kind of haunting to see that it's predetermined in a way."

Still, Walker's own perceptions about the world continue to change, which in turn, affects her work. And the latest event to alter her perspective is a big one: Motherhood. "I had no idea how much mental expansion I would go through when I had a child," said Walker, who gave birth to a son about three months ago. "My sense of the world has broadened tremendously. There are entirely new aspects to it that are like huge rooms I'm discovering in a house that I've owned for a long time."

For an artist who tirelessly builds layer upon layer of paint until a vision she may not have known she had is realized, discovery is arguably what governs Walker's work.

And in carefully scrutinizing the samples of Walker's work on display at the Rose Art Museum, one might notice a quality that stands out in "Flood Plain," a black and white painting that resembles a cracked landscape of dry mud. It stands out in the exhibit because it seems notably simpler than its neighbors. Indeed, "Flood Plain" is comprised of just two or three layers of paint, and surrounded by colorful pieces with over ten times as many.

"It was finished because it just seemed to sing at that point, so I stopped," Walker said. "I couldn't go forward because it fulfilled my need for a certain kind of visual buzz. But in fact, it's what's underneath all the other paintings in that series. And that beginning also seemed to be an ending."

"Sarah Walker: Paintings" is on display at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., through July 30, 2006.

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