WILDER ALISON

A Ripe Blackberry Murmurs to the Wall

October 30th - December 18th

FIERMAN presents A Ripe Blackberry Murmurs to the Wall, a solo exhibition of new work by Wilder Alison, and the artist’s first show with the gallery. On view are new iterations of Alison’s slit subject paintings, as well as the artist’s first foray into ceramics: rectangular prisms made of colored clay that reflect at a different degree of density the forms structuring Alison’s paintings. Slit subjects, the wool paintings Alison first created in 2014 and then revisited in depth in 2018, are comprised of lushly dyed swaths of wool fabric cut apart and pieced back together, soft bleed abutting sharp edge. The term “slit subject” stems from Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body, in which, in the original French, “je” (I) is bisected into j/e, a sign which ironically designates the impossibility of representing a coherent feminine subjectivity

within language. This notion of the feminine as existing across and between the split in subjectivity introduced by language in turn inspires the way Alison’s paintings establish a kind of disjointed conversation with the language of abstraction.

Theory aside, simply looking at Alison’s slit subjects reveals how furtively disruptive these paintings can be. Morris Louis or Frankenthaler-like pools of saturated color get sliced, severed, yielding a kind of visual static, a break in the continuity of pigmentation characteristic of the color field. Forms are severed then continue anew, albeit displaced several inches over. Compositionally, the work is rigorously serial, as the cut panels are systematically arranged in repetitive patterns that nevertheless produce unique rhythms of oscillation between color field and ground. Primarily multi-panel, the works on view in A Ripe Blackberry Murmurs to the Wall emerge in related pairs and triads, though the groupings themselves reveal off-kilter transitions between the paintings as much as they illuminate harmonies between them, a decision which reiterates Alison’s left-of-center approach to abstract painting.

Materially, the works are paintings in as much as they appear as such; however, the use of dye complicates the idea of a painterly surface insofar as there is no difference between recto and verso. Indeed, the works only begin to resemble conventional paintings when stretched; meanwhile, the use of wool—as painterly surface and as the “covering” of the stretcher—keeps the body in the fore by way of wool’s reference to its mammalian origin, one evoking both warmth and discomfort. Here Alison’s work interjects a playful critique of the dichotomy between art and craft, one which reverberates alongside the works’ disjunction of function: wool that may have warmed the body by enveloping it in three dimensions is instead repurposed as a 2-d object to be viewed as a painting.

Informed by the artist’s history with text-based work, music, multiples and zines, there are numerous playful uses and disuses of language which weave in and out of the works on view. The exhibition title A Ripe Blackberry Murmurs to the Wall, nonsensical in English, is a literal translation of the French homophonic meme, “Une mûre mûre murmure au mur,” mimicking Alison’s play with repetition gone askance. The painting titles are abstract poetry, phrases slashed by errant punctuation, which seemingly invite the viewer to construe the paintings themselves as mistranslations of sorts, existing on the other side of the representational slash brought about by language(s).

Wilder Alison is an interdisciplinary artist and a graduate of the Bard MFA Painting program. In recent years, Alison has exhibited work in New York with Thierry Goldberg, Rachel Uffner, CUE Foundation, and 247365, and in Los Angeles with Gordon-Robichaux at Parker Gallery and Artist Curated Projects. Recent solo shows include thefaucethe drain breach\ a new /ife at Gaa Gallery (Provincetown), Slit Subjects at White Columns (New York), and $PLIT $UBJECT at Marlboro College (Vermont). Alison was a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in 2016-17 and 2018-19, and has also participated in residencies at Triangle France-Astérides, Lighthouse Works, Fire Island Artist Residency, and Lower East Side Printshop, among others. Alison performs as N0 ST0NES in collaboration with psychoanalyst and musician Monroe Street Schostal; N0 ST0NES will present a commissioned work at MUCEM (Marseille) in January 2022. Alison will be a fellow at Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart in 2022-23.