Here on Untrustworthy Ground, Wilmer Wilson IV continues his interrogation of the perceived value of materials, locations, gestures, and bodies. The artist’s recent castings respond specifically to the escalating public conversations around monuments, and the debate over their removal from public view. To Wilson, the question of visibility or invisibility surrounding monuments is an inadequate solution to the problem of their legacy. Instead, the artist sees an opportunity for meaningful action in the transformative moment at which molten bronze begins to take on new form.

The work in Untrustworthy Ground memorializes pedestrian messages left in wet cement, where marks and deep impressions serve as found molds for Wilson IV’s bronze sculptures. Though stepped over and on hundreds or thousands of times each day and left to fade as the infrastructure ages with wear, these improvisational scrawlings represent an invisible collective who, through unsanctioned intervention into public space, have created an audience of readers. 

Monuments have been a recurring concern in Wilmer Wilson IV’s poetic investigations of public infrastructure. In an ongoing series, A Running Tour of Some Monuments, the artist snaps photographs of various city icons without slowing his stride. To date, Wilson IV has captured monuments in Rome, Barcelona, London, Brussels, New Orleans and Philadelphia. The resulting images are blurred and disorienting portraits that subvert the iconic status of their subjects and obscure their infrastructural significance. Untrustworthy Ground takes this concept one step further by imagining the public return of monuments to a molten state of potential energy, manifesting their reunion with the streets they occupy. 

Monuments are an important part of shared cultural experience, and yet I think over time our definition of monuments has taken on a kind of crude weightiness, or immutability, or a high barrier of entry — There is a way in which monuments have taken on this shared sense that they require a lot of energy and time and resources to produce, and that plays cleanly into these more political senses or questions of,  “who has access to resources? When?” And what that means for the history of monuments as they persist into the present moment. So, I have found myself returning to these attempts to find more improvisational, less resource-intensive ways of creating monuments, and also questioning how the monuments that we do have came to demand such resources from us as a group, as a shared cultural context, and how that might be adjusted to reflect a more complex social landscape.

— Wilmer Wilson IV