Artist and stunt-actor Walker Babington tilts toward fearlessness.
In 2014, he set himself aflame so he could press against a board before a street audience and create a “fire angel.”
He got second-degree burns. Undaunted, he continued his arts adventures.
That includes his exhibition at the Hermitage Museum & Gardens in Norfolk, which opens with a ticketed reception on Friday evening featuring pyrography (woodburning art by a different artist), live music and dancing. The show ends Oct. 12.
Carrie Spencer, curator of education and contemporary art exhibitions at the Hermitage, ran across Babington in 2023 at Burning Man. It is a yearly festival held in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, featuring inventive, large-scale sculptures. (In 2017, the Hermitage mounted the first museum exhibition of Burning Man art.)
Spencer did not schedule Babington for his link to Burning Man.
“He is from New Orleans and his piece was referring to sea level rise.”
She was struck by the local relevance. “Norfolk is right up there with New Orleans among cities in the United States at greatest risk for sea level rise.”
“Burden of the Beast” is the massive, 32-foot-tall piece Spencer saw and for which the show is named. The sculpture depicts a bison with a wooden frame house for its midsection and a ladder that visitors can climb to go inside. It will dominate the museum’s front lawn into early fall.
The creature’s legs are 13 feet tall.
“Any new structure built along the bayou has to be 13 feet off the ground,” Babington said, referring to coastal areas near him that easily flood.
He built the bison house mostly from storm debris but also using bits of an old Mardi Gras float. The piece is fanciful, but also a practical solution.
“It will carry the house to a new place. It’s hope in the face of despair.”
His other outdoor piece, “ZozoBot,” is a 26-foot-tall clown, seated and peering at its right hand through a kind of telescope. That palm is large enough for a person to crawl onto, look up through the scope to see what the clown is seeing.
“ ‘ZozoBot’ is a metaphor for artificial intelligence,” the artist said. “He’s looking down into your brain.” The piece was at last year’s Burning Man.
He also designed an installation that he’ll set up inside the museum —“a cross of being in my studio and being inside my brain.”
Babington, 40, will speak at the Friday reception. Tickets are $30. You might recognize the artist by his handlebar mustache and comical outfits, such as one he calls “out-of-work vaudevillian pirate.”
The mustache has helped snag him dozens of stunt jobs and small roles. For “Emancipation” (2022), he played a Civil War photographer opposite actor Will Smith. He’s also in the recently released “Sinners”; his one line: “Door’s locked.”
Film, television and commercial jobs flooded in not long after he took stunt classes in 2012 to learn how to make his fire angel as a “performance art” piece. When he proved he could act and speak lines well, he became a rare combination of actor and stunt performer, which brought more work.
Stunts don’t frighten him. Nor does he find it scary to build monumental sculptures that people will climb.
“On the contrary, it’s exciting.”
And this from a man who was shot by Pierce Brosnan, doubled Sam Rockwell in a bicycle crash and rode a pogo stick off a stage and into an orchestra, dressed as a kangaroo.
Visit thehermitagemuseum.org for reception tickets and more information.
