Graham Wilson
Remnants of Arcadia

December 7, 2013 - January 5, 2014
Opening Reception: Saturday, December 7, 7-10pm

Peninsula Art Space is pleased to present Graham Wilson’s solo exhibition, Remnants of Arcadia. The show will be on
view from December 7, 2013 to January 5, 2014.

In Remnants of Arcadia, Graham Wilson presents a new body of work developed over the past year. Expressionistic strokes draw the outlines of human figures in abstract arrangements, ushering forward the sensual curves of human interactions. In his work, Graham draws from the range of human expression and experience and mythological archetypes, rendering a fall from Arcadian grace in tumultuous yet pristine terms. What remains are the contours of an event, as though returned to primal, elementary forms.

In the front room, Wilson will present four paintings, whose abstractionist cords echo a violent sensuality and self-identified infatuation for the purest measure of art – the brush – transmitting historical practices into modern formats. Digging into the recesses of being, beyond or behind the unconscious, Wilson’s paintings grasp at the many elements and forms that, together, might make up a common experience of pleasure and desperation. The Agony of Daydreams circles around the anxieties of daily life, appeased or perhaps, on the contrary, excited, by lust, envy, and greed – three of seven deadly sins. In Memoir, as in the culminating work of this series, Arcadia, Graham reaches at an ineffable totality. His work is desperately ambitious in scope: attempting to run the gamut of everything that is experienced and known (and of course, what has been), they are paintings of the present yet feel like a return to a timeless state, of which past and future are components if only in their states of anticipation, excitement, and activity. 

In the back room, ten woodblock prints on canvas line the walls, primary structures whose forms recur in and throughout the paintings, like positive and negative footprints mapping areas of activity and tension. Graham’s Untitled (Crumble) further explores rudimentary forms and primary structures, metaphorically conjuring the building blocks of a painting. Made up of wooden blocks of various sizes, the work is a collaged painting, suggesting the infinite potentialities of the medium and different facets of a work through the possibility of assembling, disassembling, and reassembling of the blocks.

A limited edition artist book, with stainless steel cover, will also accompany the exhibition, and includes reproductions of the entire series of prints on view in the back room.

Graham Wilson was born in 1987 in Louisville, Kentucky. Recent group exhibitions include Amor Fati at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, New York.

Photography by Genevieve Hanson