McKenzie Fine Art: Laura Sharp Wilson 2022 Exhibition


	Laura Sharp Wilson: From the Dining Room Table November 4 - December 18, 2022
	Laura Sharp Wilson paints with acrylic on mulberry paper mounted on wood panels, creating vividly colored, precisely rendered works that draw on a visual language derived from the world of decorative arts. In this exhibition, botanical imagery predominates in compositions that are more ordered and simplified than in previous paintings. Patterns and motifs found in textiles, porcelain, and jewelry have long been a constant in Wilson’s surreal environments; forms are encircled, tethered, bound, or draped by cords, ribbons, ornamental beads, and thorny flowering vines. Wilson began to make botanical-based paintings after reading Bill McKibben’s seminal book, The End of Nature (1989). She recalls at that time the influence of April Gornick’s melancholic landscapes, L.C. Armstrong’s tropical floral paintings using bomb fuses as stamens, and Renee Green’s use of toile printed fabric to examine the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Wilson also drew from experiences of her rural New Jersey childhood, filled with daily wanderings in the woods, and activities such as building forts in the trees and transforming horse chestnuts and clover blooms into necklaces and chains. As she notes, “leaves, stems, trees, branches, grass and flowers are an obvious language for me.” Her mother’s training as a dancer introduced her to the world of costume and textiles. She also cites the influence of a long-ago viewing of Gerald Scarfe’s animation for the film version of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, with its anthropomorphized plant forms twisting and spiraling in an attempt to consume one another. At a certain point Wilson ceased her use of plant-based imagery and worked more abstractly, but has now returned to creating her idiosyncratic versions of the natural world. In these compositions, botanical imagery is transformed into a language of power and defiance, expressed as a symbol of class and social stratification, and serves as a reminder of the constant threat of environmental destruction. Laura Sharp Wilson (b. 1965, San Juan, P.R.) was raised in New Jersey and received her MFA at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has been exhibiting her work in galleries and museums nationally and internationally since the mid-1990s and has been reviewed in Hyperallergic and The Los Angeles Times, among others. She currently resides in Salt Lake City, Utah.