Higher Pictures inaugurated an exhibition of new work by Letha Wilson last Thursday 20 of November. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery.
Photo Credit: Maira Garcia
Photo Credit: Xiaofeng Li
Letha Wilson’s composites of photographic prints, concrete and steel explore how the well-worn tradition of landscape photography might take on new, more urgent meaning. Sculptural interventions onto, into and through the picture plane wrench the photographs out of conventional roles as image-artifacts and thrust them into the space and stuff of the here and now.
Here, Wilson presents her largest concrete wall sculptures to date. She cuts, tears and shapes her photographs, pushing and pulling the prints into place, and then encases portions of the composition in cement. The resulting works are dense and imposing, standing nearly five feet tall. In one piece, some fifteen unique c-prints of lush forest ferns in Hawaii alternate with layers of raw concrete and irregular bands of images made through direct emulsion transfer. In another, a large-scale, double-sided print of a Headlands landscape slices through the wall, piercing the barrier between two rooms. Natural forms and man-made materials oscillate between figure and ground. Alternately object, representation and copy, they are physically and forcibly entangled.
Letha Wilson, photo credit: Maira Garcia
Katherine Behor, Lynn Sullivan, Mathew Miller, photo credit: Maira Garcia
Photo credit: Maira Garcia
Photo Credit: Xiaofeng Li
