OPENING RECEPTION: SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 27TH, 12PM-4PM
EXHIBITION DATES: NOVEMBER 27, 2022 – JANUARY 21, 2023
Emerson Dorsch Gallery is proud to announce Paula Wilson: Be Wild. Bewilder, a solo exhibition which maps the connections in Wilson’s rich multimedia practice. Curated by Tyler Emerson-Dorsch, the exhibition focuses on how Wilson deploys fragmentation as a motif with symbolic and analogical ramifications. Her work exercises acute observations of the natural world, wide-ranging research, interstitial identities, and a vision of the powerful feminine.
Paula Wilson: Be Wild. Bewilder focuses on themes of fragmentation and regeneration. The title comes from Carl Phillips’s poem “Ghost Choir”. Phillips said: “This poem is constructed of a lot of fragments that I had not used in other poems. I wanted to mash them up and see if I could make them cohere even though they hadn’t started out that way. I thought if I put them together, just by juxtaposition, they’ll start to make associations in the reader’s mind. And I thought of them in that sense as a choir of fragments, ghosts of poems that didn’t succeed.”
Wilson also saves fragments, collects them even. They are scraps from her prints on fabric, pieces of other paintings, representations of small objects, like rocks, which are themselves pieces of a larger whole, like a boulder. Other small objects that recur in her pieces are the detritus of contemporary life, like plastic water bottles or CDs. The particulars are important. A helpful way to attend to the differences is to think about Object Oriented Ontology, where the viewer de-centers the human use for things and instead observes them for what they are in and of themselves. Wilson’s fragments have their own life – sometimes they are something to begin with or they shape-shift into something new.
Fragments are born from erosion, a process where natural forces break mountains and bones into bits. They are also born from failed or abandoned places, artifacts from cultures that, in some cases, no longer exist except in memories, which are as malleable as myths. Wilson often uses art forms incorporating fragments to make something new: collage, printmaking, stained glass, mosaics, quilts. Ruins are full of fragments, fragments of art forms she often re-imagines in her artworks: mosaics, ceramics, rugs. Her editing of these pieces generates room for her vision, one that is radically different than how twentieth-century American textbooks taught the past.
Emerson Dorsch
5900 NW 2nd Avenue
Miami, FL 33127