Anne Wilson: a hand well trained

Exhibition on view: July 7-August 11, 2017
Opening Reception: Friday, July 7, 5-7:30pm

Rhona Hoffman Gallery is pleased to present a hand well trained, Chicago-based artist Anne Wilson’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery. Softly layered, richly textured, and precisely stitched, the artist’s textile works transform ordinary materials and inspire intimate observation. Anne Wilson’s practice investigates the textile industry’s social underpinnings and the politics of re-use by laying bare fabrics’ previous lives. The new works in a hand well trained continue her conceptual deconstruction of textile and material studies, investigation of social and labor concerns, and intersections between text and textile.

 In her framed horizontal material drawings Anne Wilson scrupulously stitches along the layered edges of found linen and cotton; or in works titled Draw Out, she extends a coarse, colored fiber line until it nearly disappears into the cloth like a musical decrescendo. Meanwhile Body Into Culture, a large wall installation of tall, slit fabrics with hair and colored stitching, provides a more visceral relationship to the viewer’s body. In two sculptural works, Anne Wilson has laid out strips of cloth with reverse stitching resembling asemic writing; upon close observation, one can detect the individual hands of the artist and her studio assistants within the stitched edges. The manifold works in Anne Wilson’s a hand well trained overlay text, textile, and texture to entice viewers with close observation of the visual and social possibilities in the material world around us.