UNDRESS

For over a decade, Carrizozo, NM-based artist Paula Wilson has been “getting into” painting. Her three-dimensional work is at once a costume, a landscape, and a multi-media installation that reveals a multi-faceted look at the objectification inherent to the life of an artwork. Exploring how images, particularly paintings, acculturate selfhood, UNDRESS is a playful world where identity comes from painting and painting comes to life. For this site-specific exhibition, Wilson creates a larger-than-life woman-who-is-a-painting. This giant figure witnesses herself animated in video and eagerly records her own image with a cell phone camera. Caryatids hold up the frame of the exhibition and also star in the video. Audiences also become both the subject and object of the work as they are invited beneath the painting-woman's skirts. They are gazed at and projected upon, remixing the closed loop of viewership. Looking back from within Wilson's beautiful pieces, is an opportunity for empowerment.