Anne Wilson Event Response
Anne Wilson showed her work, titled “Dispersions”, at the Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago from October 26 to December 7 2013. This solo show fits well with the contemporary art gallery’s stated mission of presenting art that is “conceptually, formally, or socio-politically based” (Rhona Hoffman Gallery), as “Dispersions” demonstrated Wilson’s continued commitment to making art that interrogates the intersection of politics and material culture, handwork and industry, textile objects and the ideological basis of material culture.
“Dispersion” presented textile canvases of white damask cloth with jagged edges, as if torn from a bolt; each canvas is punctured by a circular hole around which embroidery is sewn with coloured fibre and human hair. The canvas is stretched across canvas so that the holes reveal the plain white mats underneath (Taft). The embroidery is utterly unfunctional; it neither repairs nor repurposes the surface textile. Instead, it draws a chaotic swarm around the hole, reminiscent of a fibrous infection colonizing a puncture wound.
The twenty-six 2.5 by 2.5 foot canvases were reportedly mounted nearly side-by-side around the gallery’s three walls; to me this again produces a creeping sense of dread, of being enveloped in the beginning of a spreading infection, or perhaps of being at the centre of maps of forced migrations away from multiple sites of trauma.
The title of the works evokes a sense that the extraneous fibre is moving outwards from an absence at the centre of the work, dispersing dark colour and the inevitable bodily associations of hair over the clean white surface of the work. We are given with the sense of human presence as an opportunistic, chaotic spreading out over our pretensions of grandeur, as we observe human fragments (hair) spreading out over damask.
The gallery’s statement accompanying the “Dispersions” exhibition (Rhona Wilson Gallery, n.d.) noted that the artist is particularly interested in themes of time, loss, and ritual. The choice of white damask certainly evokes tablecloths, and the social ritual of meals – and not just any meals, but bourgeois ones governed by pomp and circumstance and etiquette. The choice of embroidery, too, evokes a certain high-status domesticity. The torn edges, the perfectly spherical hole, the spreading, non-figurative nature of the embroidery are all disruptive of this evoked sphere.
Although differing from previous installation works in being more traditionally shaped and presented on a wall in a gallery, in many ways the work appears to be an extension of the artist’s previous thematic concerns. For instance, in light of Wilson’s earlier work interrogating the textile industry and its migration overseas (Wind/Rewind/Weave, in Knoxville, TN in 2010, discussed in Picard, 2011), these works appear to continue her interest in the disruption of our old social fabric by new technologies. That the central, grounding feature of artist’s intervention, the hole in the fabric is being made perfectly spherical, suggests not regular wear-and-tear but a surgical or industrial source of damage as the source of spreading instability.
As in Feast, mounted in Chicago in 2000, where Wilson also previously made use of “dual scale, suggesting both micro and macro worlds” (Picard, 2011) it is perhaps appropriate to again see here the duality between the intimate (the world of tablecloths and domestic needlework) and the social forces that impact them (industrial production, emigration).
“Dispersions” also continues her work’s general practice of creating an intersection between the machine- and commercially-made textile (the damask canvas) and the hand-made individual object (the embroidery) that may push viewers (particularly artists) to contemplate their own position as individuals embedded in broader structures – structures vulnerable to disruption by our own industrial or mechanical hands.
WORKS CITED
“About”. Rhona Hoffman Gallery. N.d., n.p. Web. 28 March 2015.
Rhona Hoffman Gallery. “Anne Wilson: Dispersions”. N.d., n.p. Anne Wilson Artist. Accessed online: http://annewilsonartist.com/pdfs/Anne%20Wilson%20Press%20Release.pdf
Picard, Caroline. “Center Field | Threading Infrastructure: An Interview with Anne Wilson”. Anne Wilson Artist. 31 May 2011, n.p. Web. 28 March 2015.
Taft, Maggie. “Anne Wilson: Rhona Hoffman Gallery”. Artforum January 2014 217. Accessed online at http://annewilsonartist.com/images/anne_wilson_artforum_review_2014.pdf