Aaron Wilder “Omission Rituals”

Amos Eno Gallery

[Image: Aaron Wilder "Neither Sand nor Rock" (2022) Inkjet Print from Digital Photography Collage, 15x20 in.]

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Amos Eno Gallery presents Omission Rituals, a solo exhibition of work by Aaron Wilder.

Interdisciplinary artist Aaron Wilder’s biological function of remembering has since been unreliable to the point where it becomes difficult to distinguish between memory’s relation to fact and memory’s relation to fiction. In this exhibition, Wilder presents excerpts from six self-reflective, artistic inquiries into the intersections of memory, social construction, and ritualistic omissions. An “omission” is an intentional exclusion of someone or something. As Wilder reflects on experiences of exclusion, he uses (in)visibility and concealment as artistic strategies and creates artwork in mediums including collage, drawing, installation, photography, and sculpture that to varying degrees withhold information viewers may expect or desire. A “ritual” is a series of actions performed in a defined sequence. While rituals are often derived from one’s culture and/or religion, Wilder’s rituals are personal investigations into memory, social constructs, and identity.

In Expletive, Wilder employs vividness, repetition, and the form of text to disempower slurs used everyday by obscuring the words through the stacking of its letters on top of each other. Wilder uses obscured text in two other displayed projects. Delivered Under the Similitude of a Dream uses scanned overlapping pages from John Bunyan’s 1678 book “Pilgrim’s Progress,” a heavily didactic tale of how to live your life as a Christian. This project explores the concept of layered authorship where feelings of nostalgia for a lost childhood are uncomfortably juxtaposed to a rejection of prescribed life trajectories. In Wilder’s newest project, Season’s Greetings, the overlapping layers of social constructions embedded in Christmas are peeled back through photographs of holiday decorations, shot on a Holga “toy” camera, paired with text fragments from academic journal articles. In Where is Home?, Wilder uses the same Holga “toy” camera known for its distortions ranging from blur to light leaks to photograph buildings and other aspects of physical geography from his past that used to hold meaning, but now feel distant. Blur also plays an important role in Wilder’s Imaginary Friends project that uses stuffed animals as stand-ins for himself in a range of scenarios. Each scenario is printed in the darkroom three times with an increasing amount of blur from the enlarger being taken more and more out of focus. Also using children’s toy’s, Wilder’s Neither Sand nor Rock project explores the (de)construction of personhood between childhood and adulthood by mixing black and white analog landscape photographs with color digital photographs of toy building blocks at various stages of (in)completeness.

Concurrent with Wilder’s Omission Rituals on display in the main gallery, artist Katrina Majkut’s solo exhibition Fair Play will be on display in Amos Eno Gallery’s project space. Fair Play explores the gender politics, capitalism, and worship system of baseball cards. An in-person discussion in the gallery between artists Katrina Majkut and Aaron Wilder will be moderated by art critic and Hyperallergic contributor Daniel Larkin on Friday, January 27 at 6:00pm.

Aaron Wilder is an interdisciplinary artist originally from Phoenix, Arizona. He has also lived in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and France and currently resides in Roswell, New Mexico. With the history of being a self taught artist since 2002, Wilder received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2017. He has exhibited his work extensively across the United States as well as in Italy. Omission Rituals is Wilder’s first solo exhibition at