Pamela Wilson
Hard to Remember, Easy to Forget
exhibition dates Nov18 - Dec 31
opening Friday, November 18th, 6-9pm
Pamela Wilson's 2002 exhibition of paintings at moniquemeloche gallery
was filled with poetic images of domestic interiors and exteriors investigating
abstraction through architecture. The show was peppered with a few small
paintings that might have seemed a bit out of place. But in retrospect,
these tense images taken from newspaper photographs, depicting youths
throwing rocks in protest, were just a hint at what has increasingly concerned
Wilson over the past few years. Her new exhibition "Hard to Remember,
Easy to Forget" will feature a series of modestly-scaled works on
paper. These delicate watercolors still have an air of abstraction, but
upon closer look one encounters the aftermath of natural disasters, terrorist
attacks, and war.
Oscillating between beauty and the horrific, Wilson's recent watercolor
and ink drawings offer a reflective view of violence. In images fragile
and intense, chaotic but stilled, the aftermaths of manifold acts of destruction,
both natural and man-made, are portrayed. Drawn in a muted palette of
subtle golden browns, blues, reds and greens, the images evoke the ephemeral
quality of the black-and-white newspaper clippings from which they are
culled. The tension between a medium that is delicate and expressive joined
to aggressive and tough imagery lends a power to drawings that have an
almost incongruous distance from the largely quiescent tradition of watercolor.
Pamela Wilson (b. 1954) hails from the East Coast, attended Boston University,
School of Visual Arts NY, received her BFA from University of California,
Berkeley, and her Masters of Art History and Theory from SAIC, Chicago
where she spent many years as a graduate advisor. In 2002 she relocated
to San Francisco where she taught at California College of Arts and Crafts
in San Francisco (now WATTIS). Wilson's 2004 solo exhibition at the Paule
Anglim Gallery in San Francisco garnered an Artforum review and most recently
her work was in the group show "Photoo: The Subversion and Subvention
of Photography" at the Oakland Art Gallery in California.
