Bryan McGovern Wilson
Bio: Bryan McGovern Wilson is a transdisciplinary artist whose projects investigate themes of the body, time, and ritual. Through his commitment to materials and process, Wilson looks to find the inter - sections of the hand and mind, working in concert with one another. He received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and was a Fellow at the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies at Columbia University.
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement: “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.”
— Aldous Huxley
These bodies represent the capacity for materials to communicate across the expanses of organismic, geologic and cosmic time. The drift and flow of language, the fickle shifts in culture, the rise and fall of empires—all curious conditions of our species that these things work to synthesize and anchor in the now. Human modes of understanding and relaying knowledge change at a manic clip, ecologies of information generating their own systems, micro-climates and topologies that require the non-human to translate and retransmit. We need alternative bodies. Alternative things.
The art object, or thing, holds the possibility of exceptionalism to these inevitable problems with time, things and bodies making sense of it all. The gestures of early hominids are sustained in their potency, if not their specific utility, in the now. In this way, the creative gesture—manifest in the thing—does not conform to the dominant conditions of spacetime.
These bodythings are witness to the flow of organismic time, drawing from the past, rooted in the now, transmitting into the future. They ask you to consider who and what you are as a fellow thing in meatspace—what a body stores, projects and communicates—traveling alongside us into the unknown.
As above, so below.
L to R: Visions From the Rose Core (Dimensions variable, Paper, glass, live roses, rubber, silver, copper, LED lamps, and stool, 2017); Fragile Model of the Universe (Approx. 56″ × 36″ × 24″, Paper, glass, hemp, foam, and aluminum, 2017)