| Laura Sharp Wilson 2006September 7, 2006- October 7, 2006Reception: September 7, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
McKenzie Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Laura Sharp Wilson, her first solo exhibition at the gallery. The show opens Thursday, September 7th with a reception for the artist from 6 to 8 p.m., and runs through Saturday, October 7, 2006.
Laura Sharp Wilson works in intense, lush and unexpected colors and creates a surreal, detailed vocabulary of plant forms in her paintings. Her highly personal, idiosyncratic work depicts psychologically and emotionally charged environments where the fecundity of nature is set against the imminent destruction and loss of the natural world. Her botanic imagery is imbued with anthropomorphic vitality and a sense of urgency: vine-like forms writhe and intertwine with alien foliage, seed pods and dense floral accumulations imply unstoppable regeneration and growth, thorny branches and virulent blossoms threaten corpulent nodes and incipient viscera.
The menace inherent in Wilson’s scenes of biological struggle is offset by her bright and alluring color palette and fine details. Her paintings, executed in acrylic on Japanese Unryu paper mounted on wood panel, integrate the natural fiber of the hand-made paper. This texture combines with her graphite marks and fine-lined acrylic details to create a certain delicacy usually found in drawings. Wilson counterbalances these intricate and intimate passages with arresting, otherworldly color schemes and compositional abundance.
All of Wilson’s paintings begin with abstract responses to looming, real-world environmental, political, and personal issues. Examples are lead poisoning, the appropriation of previously unspoiled natural environments by the military, and the over-consumption and over-abundance which characterizes contemporary American life. In her most recent work, the addition of structural and architectural imagery further heightens the tensions between culture and nature, as well as the individual and society; these serve as her inspiration. She writes of her process:
I use a language of nature - branches, stems, flora, vines, pods, hills, streams and mountains - to illustrate my responses. While a connection to nature is clearly made with this language, the ties become severed as natural forms are squeezed through filters of the surreal and decorative. Binding and clutter are two visual devices I repeatedly use. One is reminded of both the lushness of a rain forest and the contemporary world’s ability to trap us with its misery.
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