As a resident of Carrizozo, NM—a remote desert town of less than a thousand inhabitants—Paula Wilson’s personal life is deeply intertwined with nature. Working primarily in painting, installation, print, and video, Wilson’s multimedia practice is based on natural encounters in the Anthropocene, a period marked by unprecedented human impact on life on Earth. Of the utmost importance to Wilson is exploring humankind’s relationship to the land.
In First Story, the results of the artist’s 2010 residency at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Wilson turns her attention to urban life. The exhibition is an act of imaginative construction that speaks to the artist’s close observation during her time in Philadelphia. Produced in collaboration with FWM’s studio team, the culminating installation was first on view from May 7 through November 7, 2010.
In First Story, gallery walls bear the records of an aging metropolis and the interior lives of those occupying it. One enters a highly sculptural world, ornately but inconspicuously adorned through a hybrid making process involving stitching, woodblock print, silkscreen, lithography, and hand-applied pigment. Layered and collaged, the twenty-three individual works compose an architectural surround evocative of the city’s texture, stains, and stories. Sturdy brick walls are reimagined in plains of printed fabric, suspended in space by steel armatures. Faux pipes crafted out of felt drip water paths down these brickwork surfaces. Corinthian columns composed of felt and acrylic stand solemnly while felt eaves crown the tops of the building’s graffitied facades. Painted pigeons lead the viewer through the built environment.
Wilson aims not to beautify the cityscape by purifying it of its wear, but to highlight the beauty of the metropolis as a record of a collective lived experience. Imaginative but not fictitious, First Story is born of Wilson’s observation, memory, and daydream, symbolizing civilization and cultural divides.