anne scott wilson
frayed

Semblance at the top* 

No modern thinker can believe that the human mind is merely a passive recorder of external fact, or a mirror of nature.

Immanuel Kant

Painters are inclined to translate the everyday into patterns, chromatic fragments and form. Musicians seem to interpret through sound, rhythm and octaves. While writers convert the everyday through symbols and word associations, and video and photographic artists tend to process by combining all thought patterns. Anne Wilson combines all elemental processes, cultivating an odd space, a still psychological space, and a momentary space. Her narration distorts the ordinary, and submits a manipulation of time and space through motion, creating an interactive body-space

As the title suggests, Frayed alludes to a process of fragmentation, a physical decay of form. Here, Wilson perverts to both a physical and a psychological manifestation to the notion of Frayed. Wilson’s aesthetic is deeply haunting, bleak and undeniably intelligent. She uses sharp contrasting scenes, which seem to navigate both disunity and unification, altering the poetics of space. “I see these images relative to a yearning,” Wilson comments. “It is symbolic of the opposites that compete in life.”

Wilson paints a temporal illustration of movement, measuring time by the use of motion. The installation consists of two projections titled HERE and THERE, and a pathway between them. The pathway inadvertently becomes an active ingredient to the reading of the work and largely a component to interactivity. Indeed, Wilson frames a conversation between our material world and the inner self, and fundamentally questions how these two worlds communicate, interact, and co-exist. Wilson unavoidably cultivates an effective framework, where the pathway becomes the threshold through which both the self and the material world interact. The pathway could well become an anchor to the origin of the physical world and the illusion of it. Here, Wilson questions whether nature is a manifestation, and a projection by the self, and therefore only exists within us. In doing so, Wilson explores the tensions that exist between sensory and unconscious realities. The self contains both the projection of the landscape and the projection of the body’s inner geography. The pathway has undoubtedly become a vehicle for understanding and examining the internal self.

In these works, HERE and THERE, Wilson creates an immersive contemplation between the landscape and the body, and purposefully these two works mirror each other, both in form and in time. They create a strange reflection, making it difficult to decipher who is imitating whom? No reference to land, or origin, these works produce a degree of disorientation as the viewer is privy to a fragmentation of the whole image. In the work HERE, Wilson has focused her lens predominantly towards the woody plant tops, creating a type of heightened elevation. Time is partially evident being anchored by a natural wind. In contrast, the work titled THERE, featuring what appears to be human hair blowing in an upward direction, is stimulated by an artificial wind. And again both these works only reveal the top end of the image, provoking the viewer to become both nature’s roots and the body’s torso. It’s a temporal and spatial experience. The kinetic installation envelops the spectator within the fabric of the artificial environment, creating a metaphysical space. The viewer plays a considerable role by traversing both subject and spectator and indirectly becomes the navigator to both the narration and the foundation. The spectator is contained within the boundaries of the higher self and our external landscape, examining how we embody the empirical associations to our internal thought patterns.

Both HERE and THERE, produce a strange semblance and a harmonious meeting point, alluding to successive states of consciousness and the order of co-existing. There is a strange interplay of shifting perceptions, anchored by an undefined current. The landscape featured in the works is in constant transition. It’s an exchange, a dialogue between the two works, where nothing seems to unveil, only time measured by motion. Indicative of humanity’s nostalgia for something “other” and for a transcendence beyond the physical, these works, HERE and THERE, prompt a sense of uncertainty, a tension, and a suspension in anticipation of an intervention of some sort. The audience may well be in constant angst waiting for something to unveil. Yet these works are primarily an examination of motion, evoking an altered sense of consciousness. Wilson is undoubtedly more interested in employing a transitional space, and a space in constant flight, rather than producing a definitive end point. The slowness of motion forces the spectator into a strange negotiation between the self and its landscape. Wilson employs repetition, motion and memory to create an infinite space, creating a psychological path to an undefined destination.

Indirectly Wilson asks whether humanity can ever really have a truthful knowledge of the physical world? The mind seems imprisoned within a definitive landscape, and restricted within the confines of that landscape, yet we yearn to reach beyond. It is the idea of yearning that Wilson so poignantly searches for. Humanity seems in a constant hunt for a transcendence of some sort, yet as Wilson illustrates the search begins and ends within the self. The discovery is a process of translation from the everyday into something other. Yet this translation has been somewhat conditioned by a pre-determined knowledge and our own inner geography.