photo: WATANABE Osamu

Errant Behaviors

ArtistAnne WILSON
Year2004
Material/ Techniquevideo and sound installation
Copyright Notice© 2004 Anne Wilson
Composer: Shawn Decker, Animator: Cat Solen, Post-production Animator and Mastering: Daniel Torrente
Year of acquisition/ donation2006
DescriptionBorn in Detroit, USA in 1949. Lives and works in Chicago.

Using materials such as lace, linen, human hair, and thread, Anne Wilson skillfully employs the techniques of sewing, weaving, and tying in creating works that investigate human perceptions and meaning as a culturally constructed linguistic norm. Her works range from panels, stitched into fabric using thread or hair, to large-scale sculptural pieces 10 meters wide and video and photographic creations. Working with her hands, Wilson creates a dense, eloquent world by interweaving the emotions awakened by her materials – which richly evoke privacy and the body – with our memory of the functions they originally served and the complex, delicate textures produced by her use of pins and bits of thread.

"A Chronicle of Days" consists of 100 pieces created one a day from 1997 to the following year, like entries made in a diary. In each, the remains of human activity – hair and thread of various colors stitched in linen of patterned weave – evoke stains, scars, and bacterial colonies. The pieces could be called “physical drawings” the artist has stitched spontaneously, employing whatever hair or cloth she has happened to choose that day. The video sound installation "Errant Behaviors" emerges from the sculptural work, "Topologies", Wilson showed in 2002. In "Errant Behaviors" – by photographing successive frames while moving her materials each time, and combining the frames to produce motion – she awakens to life the world she created in "Topologies" using thread, pins, and pieces of lace, together with sound composed especially for the imagery. The essence of Wilson’s art can also be found in "Microcosm (one)", a work she has produced for a window space in a gallery of this museum. The world of her creation evokes the spider-web city of writer Italo CALVINO, where threads run among the houses, but also suggest nerve networks or the Internet.

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