SPACE: Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago
SHOW: Portable City, Wind Up, Notations
DATES: January 25 – March 1, 2008
REVIEWER: Caroline Picard

The broad scope of Anne Wilson’s show Portable City, Wind Up, Notations examines the structures and context of social life, particularly the experience of a contemporary person functioning in a contemporary society. To address this properly, one must examine the multiple facets of an individual—the relationship between that individual with him, or herself, as well as the relationship between the individual and the society in which he or she exists. Between these two poles the individual occupies a variety of distinct partnerships.

Image from artist’s website.

At Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Anne Wilson engages the different architectural rooms to represent those different types of relationship, using different aspects of her work to focus on those variant positions. While on the one hand there is an overarching utopia in the show: a portrait in which nature and industry are married, that utopia nevertheless seems to rise out of current threats of environmental crisis and global inequality – pointing, on the other hand, to a kind of post-apocalypse debris field.

In the Large Gallery, Wilson achieves a special distance, creating as she is reflecting the system of a city. Forty-six separate Plexiglas vitrines stand in the room as discrete but communal sculptures. They function in a variety of ways: as aerial maps of neighborhoods, three-dimensional paintings, or, with a bending of the knees, as miniature models of systematized community—suggesting architectural models. In this room, especially, the miniature forms are based on ideas of progressive and organic architectural structures. Yet they sit in their vitrines, like an abandoned world in the wake of fleeing inhabitants.

Every section of “the city” is 20” tall and bound by rectangular borders, varying from 31” x 10-40.” Each “neighborhood” boasts a cryptic and specific function that serves the larger whole. Portable City No. 40 features a huddle of yurt-like structures. Wilson has created a vocabulary of structures woven in combinations of fine spun thread and wire, within a limited palette of neon yellow, green, orange, brown, black and grey. The pointed heads of pin-needles cast shadows, while fine perpendicular nails (like telephone poles: the thread is wound in traditional weaving patterns around fulcrums that resemble power lines) add punctuation and rhythm to the organic nets and bundles of thread. In observing this work, one begins to feel like a person from the future, an archeologist where the relics of life remain like abandoned cocoons.

In Portable City No. 1, forms reminiscent of power plant chimneys litter the surface. In these chimneys, there is an undeniable experience of time, where the structure itself stands up because of the pattern of the weave. A tight and delicate series of over and underlying threads—made, no doubt, with a steady and habitual patience. The meticulous and miniature structures, often times made only of thread, hold their shape on the strength of the weave, the tension of the thread.

Meticulously woven, in some cases, on a miniature “warp,” (a traditional process of organizing thread by snaking it in and around a series of poles in order that it might later be woven into a garment,) these forms must have taken Wilson hours to execute. Forever there is the presence of the maker, the artist constructing the individual components of the city, one by one, within time, each “yurt” or “power plant” its own little meditation—the artist winding the wire around her thumb in order that these little chimneys might stand up! and do their job. Other neighborhoods resemble power lines, another a field of debris on the outskirts—where pins and small commas of wire stand in what almost looks like a musical score with its score pulled out and tossed off. The notation is fallen in disarray, like a tablecloth pulled out from under a table setting.

This portrait of the city alone is not realistic. We would lose something if we were not able to humanize the scale, to see too the process of relationships that necessitate its functionality. One must descend from the bird’s eye view of abstraction to a closer engagement with community. Wilson makes the descent graceful. She brings the viewer towards the light, in the front of the main bright gallery window where the work of community is exposed in Wind-Up.

Between the abstract distance and the earthy context of communal work, there is a harbor of partnership. That partnership relates the practice of community and the solitary meditation of the individual. From the heights of an impersonal vantage, one begins to step down into community, finding first a middle ground or ledge where the reflection gained by the aerial view can be translated to another individual, and then achieving a literal and practical application on the ground. As the co-creator of this one piece alone, Shawn Decker works as a partner, functioning as an interloper between the larger group and the single individual.

Together, audio artist Shawn Decker and Anne Wilson give us a visual/audio tapestry. On the wall there are twenty prints of variously colored dots on a black background. They look like two dimensional nightscape relatives of the vitrines in the Large Gallery. In fact, they are transcriptions of the physical and repetitious weaving patterns that Wilson used to construct her mini-epic-city. Meanwhile, Decker uses these prints like a musical score that is activated by an audio installation playing on two speakers. Borrowing segments of the music used to construct Wind-Up, Decker collaged sections, or notes, of that music together to create his own reconstruction of experience, recreating the work of an individual in the language of the community. It might be like a person at a bar recounting a story of his best friend in the vernacular of the company he is telling the story to. In so doing, he translates a one-on-one experience into a communal one. What is compelling about this piece especially is the way the music reconstructs the activity of making, whereas the city in the Large Gallery remains a static monument of that activity.

Finally, though perhaps most visceral, is Wind-Up. In this work, a number of collaborators decided to walk the warp, this time life-sized, all forty yards of it. The physical imposition of the frame in this third gallery room, recalls the miniature scale of the earlier vitrines, giving one again the sense of having descended from on high to ground level. Twenty stakes of stainless steel stand upright in a frame, or ‘warp’ 30” x 17 ft x 7ft. Woven in and out of these stakes is a linear thread of neon-yellow. The color is most saturated at the base, lessening as it comes to the top. It seems to breathe up, like mist emanating from the ground, an effervescent and shifting field of color. The yellow thread is the same thread used for the safety jackets of construction workers, recalling again the premonition of danger that hung over Portable City. In this case, however, it’s slightly more alarming in that the color feels more immediate, more recognizable and even unnatural. In the midst of the communal creation of this piece, there seems to be a signal of danger, a warning to all viewers that something is awry.

Wind-Up is another representation of the process that went into the construction of Portable City, except in this case it is human-scale. A collective communion of activity subsumes the vantage of reflection—Wind-Up is the process of many hands working together, falling into a calm of habit and ritual. Each participant took turns walking the warp, and while listening to music that the “walker” had chosen (music that was then appropriated by Shawn Decker). In the Large Gallery participants observed silence and wore a special white uniform, focusing on the pattern of their work. While Portable City exemplified the work of one individual working on small discrete objects, Wind-Up is a piece necessarily constructed by many hands, in the midst of a ritualistic space defined and observed by those same hands. Just as the communities were absent from Portable City, the community is what manifested Wind-Up. There is a basic and buoyant humanity in this piece. A hopeful message perhaps, that despite our current environmental crisis, we might gather together and through co-operative, communal activity recognize and overcome the danger afoot. Wind–Up is a chance to feel what it might be like to live more simply. Inherent in this experience is a cool critique of today’s world, a wink at the consumerist society we live in – in which we stand so far apart from the direct labor of making. We are so distant from this kind of work that it wields a spiritual aura in the white-cube gallery space, inspiring in me, at least, an inarticulate relief.

Anne Wilson is the recent recipient of The Dreihaus Award. [ Artist's Web Site ]