Each month, BRIC Arts | Media | Bklyn selects an Artist of the Month. Artists are featured here as well as in BRIC Contemporary Art e-blasts. Winners will be selected from the BRIC Contemporary Art Artist Registry, which is open to artists who were born, live, work, or have a studio in the borough of Brooklyn.
February 2010 | Letha Wilson
Nature and architecture coexist in Letha Wilson’s work. She is inspired by the natural world, and dissects elements of it in a range of media from painting to video to photography to sculpture.
Letha Wilson, Still from Compass Rose, 200. Color video on DVD with sound. 3 minutes, continuous loop
This merging of media is most blatant in Wilson’s photo sculptures, which expand the typical two-dimensional landscape format. She uses photographs of nature scenes in printed, rectangular formats or fragmented to better suit her needs and merges them with wooden structures that extend the landscape beyond the frame. The sculptural elements intrude on the sacred realm of landscape photography, provoking the viewer to question and reinterpret what lies beyond and within the limiting confines of the photographed environment.
In her sculptural work, Wilson often forces the sterile confines of the gallery space to directly intermix with the natural world. Made of discarded drywall and wood from galleries and artist studios, Fountain is traditional in appearance with water running through the piece. Over the course of the installation, the continual rush of water eventually deteriorates the structure of the fountain. Similarly, Wilson created a large planter made of reclaimed gallery materials at Socrates Sculpture Park in 2008. The sculpture was a place for plants to grow and guests to sit. Both works force pristine gallery walls from their confines of art world reverence, repurposing them as a functional part of the natural world.
Letha Wilson, Hanging Wall in Hemlock Tree, 2009. Drywall, wood stud, joint compound, paint. Installation at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture
Letha Wilson, Pink Cairn, 2009. Spraypaint on C-print mounted on aluminum. 14” x 11”
Even in her work on paper, Wilson continues to pursue the integration of nature and architecture giving her two-dimensional work a sculptural flair. In Pink Cairn (2009), pink spray paint builds upward and outward from the photograph behind it. With Means to an End (2009), Xerox transfers of natural (roots) and manmade (wooden table) expand from the page in creating a cycle of life and afterlife of trees connected by water-like lines of collaged photographs. While in Sunset Airplane (2009), Wilson folded a C-print multiple times to transform the flat image into a sculptural work that reaches beyond the wall while displayed.
– Johanna Taylor
Letha Wilson, Means to an End, 2009. Xerox transfer, charcoal, color photographs on paper. 22” x 22”
Letha Wilson, Double Dip, 2009. Digital print and wiggle board plywood. 80” x 5” x 38”
Artist Statement
My artwork uses images and materials from the natural landscape as a starting point for interpretation, construction and confrontation. My work creates relationships between architecture and nature, and the gallery space and the American wilderness. A broad range of techniques and materials are used – photography, collage, sculpture, video – in work that permeates the lines between abstraction and representation, landscape and architecture.
In my photo-based sculptures the ability for a photograph to transport the viewer is both called upon, and questioned; sculptural intervention attempts to compensate for the photograph’s failure to encompass the physical site it represents. Landscape photography as a genre is approached with equal parts reverence and skepticism. These works intrude upon the sacred ground of the photograph picture plane out of frustration at its immobility, and to create a new hybrid space merging the pictorial and the physical.
Letha Wilson, And So On (California), 2008.C-print, wood, paint. 40” x 50” x 2”
My interest in architecture and nature has led to recent work that juxtaposes re-claimed drywall and wood in innovative ways. These installations respond to both interior and outdoors environments, and comment on the glut of material discarded in the contemporary art exhibition cycle. The works create a reversal of roles between interior and exterior spaces in architecture by utilizing drywall in the outdoor environment, and offer a re-invention of this common building material.
About the Artist
Letha Wilson was born in Honolulu, Hawaii and raised in Greeley, Colorado. She received a BFA from Syracuse University in 1998, an MFA from Hunter College in 2003, and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2009. She has exhibited at galleries and alternative spaces in New York including Five Myles, Socrates Sculpture Park, and Exit Art among others. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Letha Wilson, The Last Words of John Muir / Occam’s Razor, 2007. C-print, wood, paint. 45” x 27.5” x 38”
Links
Artist Website
The Old Gold – Studio: Letha Wilson
Beautiful Decay