A NOTE ON THE SHOW & AN INTRODUCTION
INTRO: OPENING QUOTE
Generally I’m looking at structures of desire, whether that be desire for an object, a feeling, a person, a fantasy or an idea. We are all driven by those things, all the time. With this show I’m looking at the objects of desire- glittering glamorous things- things behind glass walls, and yet they have a mesmeric attraction- we cannot look away from these things - even if we don’t like them or we think shouldn’t like them…they have a quality and a power that cannot but draw you in…
QUOTE FROM G.W.
What to see & what to show? The first work in Parasocial, curated by Danielle Mezh, Strap In is perhaps both the most elusive and the most overt. A large scale oil on linen, layering ochres and browns - the image is originally taken from a fetish photograph, showing an off centre shot of a latex piece. Recalling the photograph, Wilkin was struck at first by its beauty, but also by its ‘obvious purpose and function’, noting the irony that desire and sex is shown so conspicuously, when it is playing in the realm of taboo.
Taking inspiration from the former, Wilkin set about to fracture & reimagine the latter - splitting the subject away from the purely sexual, to something more composite . In Strap In, she blends gesture and disguise to offer fascination, combining contemporary product and classical medium - building out the picture of beauty, disguise, and revelation in one frame.
Strap In is in fact, multiple paintings layered on top of each other - the final one being the image of the strap-on itself - though its shape remains indistinct, creating an experience that one has to ‘work hard’ to identify through the frenzy of shapes that surround it. This work is necessary, for as Wilkin notes, this is about ‘desire that is withheld’ played out behind and beneath layers, ‘...it doesn’t immediately pull people in, but over time, it reveals itself’. Far from the ease and openness of its source, Wilkin’s work demands the viewer engage for the satisfaction of identifying the image, and for the full acknowledgement of what it means to see it.
As we speak through the work, Wilkin references the work of 17th Century Baroque painter Diego Velázquez, and at once the connection is clear. Much like how the Spanish master's most famous work Las Meninas portrays a painting within a painting - muddling the role of audience, artist, royalty and maid servant - Strap In’s layers challenge us with multiple frames of engagement. Refusal, obscurity, and our desire to decipher the image seems to underpin the intrigue of this work.
In this way, each part of the audience's journey in front of Strap In becomes connected - The process of confusion and loss is critical to the epiphany moment, the deciphering of form central to the final conclusion of realising the subject. Realising the artwork and realising the act.
On the opposite wall sits Dusty Finish, a five part polyptych where Wilkin breaks from the densely layered singular frame to create a collection of tousling forms, clutching and tumbling across each canvas on the wall. Here, the restive potential of desire comes out strong, standing as an experiment in form, torsion, tension and movement.
Conceived as one work across five canvases, process mirrors presentation. Wilkin flips and cuts the same wrestling match into a collection of locked stills and over-turning figures, the forms combining both movement and static rhythm. Whilst only one fight is depicted, its motion and tension are stretched and expanded across each of the canvases and their angles - the tug & weave of desire as strong as ever as the forms become indistinct, wrapped deep in their arena of combat and performance.
If Velázquez’s framing devices are echoed in Strap In, then it is the photographer Eadweard Muybridge, with his studies of continuous movement recreated through multiple stills, that comes out most boldly here. Each canvas in Dusty Finish takes a distinct perspective on the fight as it unfolds, with Wilkin’s broad overlay of brushstrokes creating a patina that speaks to the energy of the wrestlers, confusing the visual boundary of where form finishes and frame begins, and re-activating that desire to find, and to distinguish.
After the musculature of restive bodies, a striking blue snapshot of a woman's eyes cuts through the gallery space on the left hand wall, her gaze part rebuke, part pose. Far from being hidden beneath layers, Blue Portrait is a painting which suggests itself -and it is here that the dynamic of desire shifts. Less concerned with what is hidden and withheld and more with a structure and satisfaction of easy and striking serendipity.
Markedly different in both its colour and scale, Blue Portrait was created earlier than its partner works. Wilkin explains making multiple images per day - this swift repeated creativity offering a sense of catharsis and relief through its freedom, lightness and looseness. Far from the labour and process of Dusty Finish and Strap In, this work was a ‘ release…a sort of flexing of the muscles’ - made through swiftness and spontaneity and coming to Wilkin with the dynamic tenacity held & expressed in the subject's challenging gaze.
The final work of the show, Weorþung, rises to meet us face on. Finished in the ochre tones seen across much of the artist’s oeuvre, this work has the figurative spirit of Blue Portrait depicting three dancers' heads - their expressions caught between endeavor and serenity as they play out their part on their stage and the canvas.
Inspired by the maverick dance collective (La) Horde, Wilkin took the initial inspiration for the work from an audience video that had been reposted online after the performance online. This kind of found and shared footage (and the artistic expression that it can inspire), is an approach that the French collective embraces. Far from keeping their performances only on stage, the repetition and resharing of dances on digital platforms is encouraged. Technology is seen as one and the same with reality: the placing of compositions in contemporary digital content becoming a necessary engagement with the culture around the group, and an extension of each performance itself.
This entwined relationship between technology and reality fascinates Wilkin. For Weorþung, she watched & re-watched the movement footage to capture the expression and sequences she most desired to portray. This stop-start process of playback, coupled with the stacking formation of the figures and the beating of the drums that (La) Horde use to soundtrack their work, creates a dance in itself - offering artist, performer and audience a place in the routine of repetition and reinvention.
(La) Horde’s own inspiration points are pertinent: Influenced by pre-Christian dances, which are in turn reimagined through classical ballet and offset through electronic soundscapes & costume, each element of the dance becomes reliant on the other, their sources being expanded and celebrated once they are included within the same frame.
Wilkin continues ‘... I love the way they think…[they challenge] who gets to decide the politicisation of a certain physical movement - the meaning of any gesture can be recontextualised...’ and this process is apparent in the composition of the piece. Whilst Weorþung focuses on the dancers’ heads, the site of feet, arms and torso, the most physical motivators and markers of the dance itself, are all left off picture. As the dancers disrupt their gestures and the audiences disseminate their film, so the proximity of performance, experience, collective & singular comes to the fore.
Throughout Parasocial, and indeed throughout the artist’s practice as a whole, reference is turned and expectation troubled. In this, the show offers us that gateway through the ‘glass’ that Wilkin first speaks of - changing our relationship with desire by troubling our comfort and our expectation, forging engagement and participation between viewer, subject and work in every detail and every frame.
