hilary wilder

Nearer to Thee (2008)

Nearer to Thee is an installation in which painting, photography, text, and video are used to address the quest for transcendence and the vehicles – both sacred and profane – that are used in this pursuit. The installation’s title is taken from “Nearer My God to Thee”, a well-known hymn in which religious faith is called upon in the face of personal difficulty (it is also infamous for having been played during the sinking of the Titanic). The title has been modified to allow for allusions to both secular and sacred devotion, and the components of the installation make reference to the natural sublime, religious conversion, and romantic love. The Great Day of His Return is a large-scale, somewhat hyperbolic response to Romantic landscapes and to 19th-century American religious paintings that depict the wrath of God. Call and Response (Jim Weatherly and T.S. Eliot), a text work, interleaves the stanzas of “Ash Wednesday”, Eliot’s poem about his conversion to Catholicism, with Weatherly’s lyrics from “Midnight Train to Georgia”, a song of personal sacrifice for one's true love. Other works suggest the limitations of the pursuit of transcendence as a wholly subjective experience (Two Sunsets that Changed My Life and Three That Didn’t), and the impermanent nature of love and the imperfect vocabulary available to describe it (the video Breaking Even (For Pattie)).

A Castle Dark (For Cathy) (2007)

In an effort to parallel and yet frustrate the notion of the romantic journey that leads to discovery, the works in the series A Castle Dark tell the story of Cathy Smith, a one-time Rolling Stones groupie best known for her implication in the drug-related death of John Belushi. As her life follows a narrative arc that includes a type of salvation through romantic love, escape through drug use, and subsequent punishment, retribution and eventual redemption, particular vignettes in this series of paintings are constructed from the visual details of her life. Included in various works are the stripes on the tour bus that she drove for Gordon Lightfoot, a juxtaposition of the chaparral hills of Los Angeles and the forests of Eastern Canada (rendered in a manner that alludes to Canada’s most famous and much beloved landscape painter, Tom Thomson), and a wallpaper pattern common in Toronto in the 1970s.

The Voyage South to Patience Camp (They Wondered How Tomorrow Could Ever Follow Today) (2006-7)

The Voyage South to Patience Camp is a composite of imagined situations and locations that are flawed, broken or dismantled. A burning house, an ice-bound ship, billows of smoke, and the remnants of a once-elegant hotel could be (but need not be) assembled into a narrative about exploration, isolation and failure; the title of the work alludes to the Shackleton expedition, but also to the very simple notion of acknowledging unpleasant circumstances and hoping that things might change for the better. Although primarily influenced by the depiction of the romantic sublime and by decorative sensibilities popular in turn-of-the-century England, some of the installation’s component parts – fleurs-de-lis, animal prints, and Carnaby street striping – are also associated with British popular music of the 1960s and early 1970s. In this sense, the assumed refinement of the British Empire is collapsed into a type of vulgarity, and the installation suggests not only material fallibility but also the inevitable failure of aesthetics to retain meaning.

Sail to Bequia, Evening at Turtle Grove (2006)

12/23/85 -- Mon -- fly LAX / Miami / St. Lucia
12/24/85 -- Marigot Bay; leave late - 2:30 - rain; $20 tip to guys for carrying boxes
12/25/85 -- attempt to sail to St. Vincent/dinghy sinks/turn back; $10 tip for anchoring

Our culture abounds with subjects – particular people, places, lifestyles, aesthetics – that are romanticized and idealized, and thus draw attention to the ways in which our own experiences are, by comparison, dull and uninspiring. However, if, as T.S. Eliot wrote, culture is lived religion, it would seem that - somewhat paradoxically - we rely on these illusions to provide our lives with meaning and stability.

I have recently been revising mundane personal narratives, investing them with a sense of drama and importance by making reference to Victorian design strategies, contemporary decorative motifs, and the history of painting. My current installation, Sail to Bequia, Evening at Turtle Grove, is a re-scripting of my father Steve’s sailing vacation in the Caribbean in 1985; some of the works chronicle a specific - albeit insignificant - event: Steve’s sighting of Mick Jagger in a bar in Bequia. My father and Jagger were born on the same day, and their near-encounter serves as a metaphor for the dissonance that occurs when the real stumbles upon the ideal, the ordinary upon the celebrated. A mechanical engineer by profession, Steve led a life that was structured and practical; in a poignant, albeit unwitting repudiation of the Western literary genre of the journey that leads to enlightenment, his notes from this vacation are dry and quantitative, consisting mostly of detailed accounts of distances, expenditures, and fuel usage. The paintings are a means of forcing the trip to be perceived as romantic; idealized landscapes are constructed from an uneasy synthesis of early modernist geometry and muted glazes that allude to 19th-century Romantic works. Some paintings are based on photographs, others are borne purely from imagination; in this way, they are constructed in the same manner as memories, conflating known facts with what one wishes to have been true.