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Amy Wilson at Bellwether
Art in America, Sept, 2005 by Brian Boucher
Art that thoughtfully responds to the current insanity in American politics and the cravenness in our media is like rain on parched earth. Amy Wilson's exciting first solo show presented the perspective of a well-read conspiracy theorist and news junkie, a skeptic who, while articulating widespread dread and mistrust, still holds out hope.
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The more than 80 small, horizontal, scroll-like drawings and acrylic paintings in this densely hung show depict cartoonish, Henry Dargeresque landscapes. In the paintings, colors are bright and flat; they are translucent in the pencil-and-watercolor drawings. Blank expanses of sky leave space for the text bubbles that drive the works, otherwise populated by blonde and barefoot little girls battling skeletons. Sometimes the girls lose and have their guts cut out, or hold each others' decapitated heads and cry. All the while, they converse on topics like cynical American foreign policy and heartless global capitalism; supplementary materials at the show identified wide-ranging sources, from Baudrillard to bloggers, cable news to talk radio. Tiny lettering crams the bubbles, sometimes spilling out of them, as if Wilson couldn't edit herself down. Amid all the seriousness are lighter touches: a smiling sun is emblazoned with the words "March of Democracy"; ants emerging from a hill spell out "valor."
Conspiracy theories are Wilson's thing, and the drawings touch on such mainstays as aliens and government mind control. One of her drawings, however, describes the shortcomings of these ideas: "They offer neat and complete answers to very complex problems that then lead to the abandonment of a search for deeper solutions."
"The Global Appeal of Liberty" (2005), a suite of drawings that gave the exhibition its title, exemplifies Wilson's approach, in which various voices address related subjects in a stream-of-consciousness manner. The girls build a boat and contemplate leaving America as a GI describes insurgent attacks. They express a strange pleasure in the idea of government complicity in 9/11: "having all our worst fears confirmed gives us a measure of comfort." Hanging by nooses from palm trees, they expound on the nature of evil in the face of Abu Ghraib while analyzing the flaws of anti-war arguments. The final drawing classifies our Mideast adventure as yet another government lie, as some deem the official accounts of the JFK assassination and Pearl Harbor to have been. But, afloat in their boat, the girls predict the collapse of the current corrupt system and affirm, "There's a twinkle in the eye of every conspiracy theorist, a glimmer of hope for a better life."
More often, though, the tone of the works is despairing: "Is the point to get us all so sick with heartache that we simply stop trying?" In the end, Wilson uses fervid whispering as a response to alienation. Plagued with fear just before the 2004 election, watching people go happily about their business, a character in one drawing wonders with horror, "Is it just me? Am I the only one?" In Wilson's drawings, we find out we're not alone.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group
