"Perhaps it’s personal (though at this moment in history, it seems this might not strictly be the case), but I have recently experienced times where saying something directly was unbearably difficult. The risks were too great, or I felt pressure for my speech to look or sound a certain way. Thinking in terms of a lexicon instead of a linear statement was useful in these moments-- it allowed for connections to form loosely between sentiments and to be rearranged at will. Bringing that lexicon into space by tethering its components to the chair form emphasizes that something simple like the act of choosing where to sit is its own speech act, just as the act of sitting with others is too. The text selections walk a line between standing alone as complete sentiments and becoming a modular fragment of a larger statement. In the drawings, the text-chair combination takes on a monumental quality, rendered as if seen from below. Ink also offered an opportunity to register affective annotations to the text that might be seen as divergent from its everyday associations, such as in I WANT and THOUGHTS. With the chair sculptures, while their text might be read as interior concerns when taken individually, it is the presentation of the group as a whole that makes this work insist on the collective nature of speech."

"I spent a lot of time looking at chairs used by various artists-- the chairs of Abramovic’s "The Artist is Present," Joseph Beuys’ chair holding animal fat, Holzer’s Benches-- and also chairmaking ergonomics, which have a degree of consensus surrounding certain angles of recline being for work chairs and deeper angles for contexts where people will be comfortable enough to stay for a while, like dining. The flat-pack modularity and aggregation of identical chairs might suggest an institutional gathering or waiting space. But these chairs were also designed with dining chair ergonomics in mind, which I hope lends a degree of conviviality to the collective sitting space(s). My work has made frequent use of plywood as a key manufactured material of architectural infrastructure. Plywood is also a prominent feature of domestic life, and its use here is in service to lending a domestic register to the chair’s shaping of the body."

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.

"Sumi ink has a rich history of use in calligraphy, making it an essential medium for rendering text. In some ways, ink is akin to speech--speech exits the body in a line, and once spoken, it cannot be put back or undone. Similarly, ink differs from watercolor or other drawing media in that it can’t be removed from the paper once applied. I am excited by the way this forces drawings to become containers for immediate decision-making and an index of the gestures of their making, like choreography. This also imbues text with the speech-like quality of linear time."

"My sculptural work has remained interested in drawing attention to the viewer’s own body--the staple works from my previous show at the gallery enact a lenticular surface that has to be negotiated through a process of active looking and movement throughout a space. In fact, a key goal in my work has been to draw attention to the inseparability of art and body--both the body of the artist and of the viewer. This work for Embodied Lexicon makes use of the inherited collective understanding of what a body does with a chair, and injects it with the tension of choice surrounding charged facets of interior life signified as language. I am interested in the automatic confrontation this group of text-laden chairs presents about how to place one’s body in relation to any given one."