| MY PAST | I SOLD | I WANT |
| CHARISMA | DEATH | AIMLESS |
| DEPRESSION | CANDID | FUTURE |
| CRITIQUE | RAGE | PLEASURE |
The twelve chairs, designed elegantly and arranged variously, invite visitors to sit. By tethering language to a form so quintessential to human spatial understanding as the chair, Wilson’s work demands that all viewers become participants in defining their embodied relation to these affects, urges, and concepts. There is a depth to the challenge each chair poses, prompting a range of free associations as well as a self-awareness of their performative meanings in relation to publics both present and imagined. Having sought a way to break free of the linear restraints of language, Wilson creates a modular lexicon that activates language spatially and relationally.
The exhibition also includes ink drawings depicting these language-chair forms, inscribed with an overlapping but not identical lexical range. The perspective depicts the chairs as above the line of sight of the viewer, rendering the chairs monumental, totemic. Auratic cloudings of ink serve to heighten the affective potency of the language. By merging text, sculpture, and the body, Wilson positions language as something experienced through the body, memory, and collectivity.
WILMER WILSON IV (b. 1989) investigates the marginalization and care of Black bodies in contemporary life. Born in Richmond, VA and based in Philadelphia, Wilson is concerned with “the way that blackness is shaped in and by city space” and interested in “producing possibilities for representation that exist apart from global advertising strategies.” Wilson holds a BFA from Howard University (2012) and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania (2015). The artist has been part of exhibitions and performances at the African American Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (2023); the Murray Art Museum, Albury Australia (2023); the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, University of the Arts, Philadelphia (2022); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2021); Philadelphia Museum of Art (2021); New Orleans Museum of Art (2019); New Museum Triennial, NYC (2018); Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (2017); Flanders Fields Museum, Belgium (2017); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2015); and the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. (2015). His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Baltimore Museum of Art; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond among others.
