Anne Wilson
Each carefully shaped mass of hair has a certain stark beauty, an almost minimalist perfection of form. And the placement of the works side by side recalls the serial imagery of minimal and conceptual art. But each mass of hair is organic, unruly, filled with tiny random variations in direction. There’s a tension between the rectilinear formality of the framing, the simple shape of each piece, and the occasionally skewed directions of each strand.
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It’s common for a modernist artist to produce an artwork that balances contradictory possibilities. Typically all the contradictions are equally balanced, and the work presents itself as a paradox. Wilson’s work never settles into one or the other of the polarities described–we simultaneously see these pieces as real hair and as faux paintings–but its powerful, almost quirky edge comes from the way the possibilities are so different from each other. This is far from the finely tuned, almost intellectual balance of a Cezanne.
Devour, for example, is a white table linen, approximately three feet square, whose border of embroidered white roses one hardly notices at first: this rather banal, predictable pattern is overwhelmed by the enormous mass of tangled red hair filling the blank center of the cloth, a woolly ball dense at the middle and splaying out into individual strands at the edges. Immediately evident are the contradictions between the linen’s regular weave and design and the hair ball’s chaos, the opposition between cloth made of plant fibers and the unruly hair that is humans’ principal “fiber.” But such intellectual niceties pale before the sight of the thing. The “devouring” of the title seems to be still happening, the hair at the ball’s edges reaching out to consume more and more of the well-ordered linen. It’s as if a central artifact of the bourgeois life-style were being eaten up by a living mass of hair. If the hair encased in the I Cut My Hair series is static, arranged, powerful only because of its length and sensuality, this hair has escaped all such taming; neither cut nor arranged, it continues to grow.
The first two works Wilson made were white cloth fragments starting to come apart that Wilson tried to repair with black thread, but most of the cloth fragments have holes at their centers. The cloth comes from domestic linens and handkerchiefs obtained from Wilson’s family, flea markets, and other sources; the holes, according to Wilson, “were worn into the fabric from over use, uneven bleaching, burns, or exposure to acidic substances in storage.” Wilson then stitched in dark thread around the holes’ perimeters, not only accentuating each visually but fixing it as a hole. Rather than repairing the cloth, she freezes it in a state of disrepair. In most of the pieces, human hair has been stitched into the fabric around, and occasionally behind, the hole. The dark threads and hair serve as markers for the cloth’s deterioration: where the weave is weaker, the dark thread is thicker. In some pieces, the cloth nearest the hole is virtually covered with dark thread.
With their striking mix of shapes, the Areas of Disrepair works are elegant and even oddly beautiful, precious aesthetic objects intended for the gallery. Yet the way they’re displayed, on slightly angled shelves, also suggests weird artifacts in a natural history museum. They can be taken, tongue in cheek, as actual attempts to repair cloth–or as little home sewing lessons. Viewed with only a little imagination, they might be talismans or fetish objects from some unknown civilization. That all of these are equally plausible possibilities is the works’ greatest strength. Despite the odd, somewhat discomfiting physicality they gain from hair and thread and fabric falling apart, they are also sui generis constructions, with no scenario to explain them. Their mystery and power come from the viewer’s sense of them as independent presences, each a complete little universe.
