Under Deconstruction: High Maintenance Required
Under Deconstruction: High Maintenance Required is a mixed-media installation challenging color, material, and gender expectations. Wilson created this work by building it up, taking it apart, and weaving the pieces back together. The process disregarded seeing any of the pieces as being finished and untouchable—they could always be reworked into a new format. Wilson embraces her femininity through the absurd amount of the color pink and materials and making methods like cheesecloth, hair, and sewing. She challenges these associations by combining it with materials and methods like plywood, 2x4s, and constructing a large-scale installation. Wilson physically linked explorations on color and materials as she sees them exemplifying the complex topic of gender and feminism in a physical and visual format. This installation was constructed in 2020, and moving forward in the 21st century, studies into gender and feminism will remain complex and nuanced. There will never be a time where society has “solved” sexism or cracked the code on gender. The flexibility of this installation exemplifies that and that these topics will continue to evolve and shift moving forward.
To open the full digital book on Under Deconstruction: High Maintenance Required in a new window, click here.
Art as Research
Pink Research
In conversation with Under Deconstruction: High Maintenance Required, the color pink has played an important role. From a European/American perspective, pink is primarily associated with femininity—a calm, nurturing, cute color. But how did a color become associated with gender? Pink is so ingrained as being a female color that it would be impossible for me to use the color without this association coming up. This would not be the case for any other color. The goal I set for myself, then, was how can I make pink work? How can I almost exclusively use pink in my installation but combine it with textures and images that are most certainly not calm, nurturing, and cute?
“It seems to me that to reject all of these aspects of women’s experience as dangerous stereotypes often means simultaneous rejection of some of the more valuable aspects of our female identity.”
— Lucy Lippard
“What is unique about pink is that it is assertive in whatever context it appears. Pink is the way it is, and it makes no attempts to disguise itself. It is vulnerable to attack, and it tends to polarize.”
—Barbara Nemitz
“Sculpture (and art) is in its very nature supremely erotic. On so many levels. Start with the obvious ones: it has a sublime sense of surface, textures, caresses, and embrace.”
—Susan Quinnell
Pansy
An important precursor to Under Deconstruction: High Maintenance Required, “Pansy” questions the way that paintings are presented. I hinged this painting to another panel so that it stands in a room, allowing viewers to circumambulate the piece and get closer.
“Pansy” began as an exploration of my frustrations with birth control and branched out into an encompassing research project into gender and health. I investigated the ways that women have been excluded from health and the way these inaccuracies are shown through the history of anatomical drawings. Women have historically only been included in medicine when it comes to their reproductive health, ability to have children, and sexual maturity. While this is crucial information, it was also withheld from women until the mid-twentieth century, leaving women uneducated, confused, and not in control of their bodies. This work explores this complicated history by combining cellular structures and blood vessels with floral and branching imagery. These images overlay and intertwine with the collaged drawings and writings to show their interwoven history.