Laura Sharp Wilson Exhibition
McKenzie Fine Art
This event has ended.
In her second solo exhibition at the gallery, Laura Sharp Wilson continues to create detailed, highly idiosyncratic compositions expressing surreal personal narratives. She combines intricate representational and abstracted forms and layers these with botanic references into dense and colorful works. Wilson paints with precise and graphic execution using bright acrylic colors on fibrous Japanese rice paper mounted on wood panels. Several of her paintings include coiling vines, ribbons and ropes which threaten strangulation of the vessels and other shapes she has rendered. While earlier paintings explored socio-political and environmental concerns and were dominated by plant forms, Wilson's new paintings are more intimate and explore her feelings of dislocation and rootlessness, prompted by multiple moves throughout the United States in recent years. They express a desire to gain clarity --- represented visually with obsessively repeated patterns and dots --- amidst the chaotic elements in her life. There are also specific symbols in her new paintings: domestic signs of comfort and home in the form of vases; necklaces which function as obsessive, frivolous decoration or conversely, as worry beads; prayer flags as markers of Olympia, WA, her current residence, in contrast with images of New Jersey, where the artist grew up. In these new paintings Wilson acknowledges the influence of such artists as Keith Haring and Philip Guston, but also outsider artists such as Bill Traylor and Judith Scott, a deaf artist with Down Syndrome who obsessively bound objects with fiber.
Media
Schedule
from March 19, 2009 to April 25, 2009