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.
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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?
The Pink Manifesto
One of the most intriguing qualities of pink soon stood out to me: pink is red. No other tint (lighter version of a hue) has its own name like pink does. Pink describes a whole category of light reds that also each have their own connotations. In the image above, I took a photo of all the red to pink paint swatches at Home Depot. The names highlight the associations people have with the color and some of the contradictions. What really struck me was distinctions between things like when does “Flirt Alert” become “100 MPH,” where is the line between pink and red and the idea of girly/sexy to masculine/aggressive? These minor shifts, this in between pink and red has been exactly what I’ve been exploring. It has highlighted the absurdity of so strongly gendering something as seemingly simple as color, while also making me wonder what else has been gendered? What other binaries have we set up for ourselves with objects, ideas, and actions that have nothing to do with sex?
“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
Feminism
Feminism plays an important role in my practice, but the term “feminist” has a complicated history. I am endlessly interested and engaged with issues primarily related to the female body. It feels incomplete to dismiss older texts and the way they precede modern ways of thinking, even if some of the movements in the 1970s fell short when it came to including lower class and non-white women. These histories are important to understand and acknowledge. This piecing together of information is apparent in the way that my works come together—I am constantly layering, overlapping, revealing, and tying together seemingly disparate parts of my pieces in the same way that I am trying to synthesize all this information.
“The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn’t have the weight of gender expectations.”
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Methodology
My making methods have directly reflected the kind of reading I’ve been doing. I have physically been weaving together and collaging different elements in my attempt to combine and digest the plethora of information and stories on feminist movements over time. From the documentary, Feminists: What Were They Thinking?, Laurie Anderson states that women are, “Very skilled at understanding networks and how things work, seeing things as not a big story line with a big narrative arc, but as a fabric that is bound together. You can’t do anything without it affecting something else.” With this mentality in mind, the idea of creating a “fabric” of ideas and materials has been imperative for the making process. I’ve been covering up layers and information, while revealing and emphasizing other areas.
“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
Wet Pillows
I was intrigued by how the common materials of cheesecloth, hair, staples, glue, water, and paint could create such off-putting images. The unsettling images in combination with a supposedly comforting object like a pillow is humorous and absurd. It shows the impact of materials on how we understand and form association with objects and images.
“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, 54”x72"x72”, mixed media on canvas, 2019
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.
Pansy, 54”x72”, mixed media on canvas, 2019
Pansy (detail), 54”x72”, mixed media on canvas, 2019
Pansy (detail), 54”x72”, mixed media on canvas, 2019
Pansy (detail), 54”x72”, mixed media on canvas, 2019
Pansy (detail), 54”x72”, mixed media on stretcher bars, 2019
Pansy (detail), 54”x72”, mixed media on stretcher bars, 2019