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Hilary Wilder - Painting, Installation and Video

11/17/2009
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Room 204 Educational Sciences Building
1025 W. Johnson Street
Madison, WI 53706
5:40 p.m. - 6:30 p.m.

Parking is available at Grainger Hall

All events are free and open to the public.

In this Tuesday Talk Colloquium lecture, alumna Hilary Wilder (MFA '01) comes back to speak of her work navigating the territory between painting, installation and video.

In Nearer to Thee, her recent large-scale installation at the Open Satellite in Seattle, 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. Works in the show 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.

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 (2007) 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.

Hilary Wilder has had solo exhibitions at Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery, Houston and at the Atlanta Center for Contemporary Art. In 2008, she was the inaugural resident artist at Open Satellite in Seattle, Washington. In 2007, she participated in the SIM Artist Residency, in Reykjavik, Iceland. From 2002 to 2004 Core Program, she attended the Visual Artist Residency/Critical Studies Residency, at the Glassell School of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas.

Wilder is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and a 2006 recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. She is currently an Assistant Professor, in the Department of Painting and Printmaking, at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Funding is provided by the Anonymous Fund.

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