Letha Wilson
LETHA WILSON
Born in Honolulu in 1976, Letha Wilson was raised in Colorado where she experienced the dramatic terrain of the Rocky Mountains firsthand, resulting in a lifelong engagement in landscape photography. Moving to New York state at eighteen, she attended Syracuse University where she received a BFA in painting, later earning an MFA at Hunter College in Manhattan. Wrestling with the conventions of landscape photography, Wilson began to unearth new visual perspectives by expanding the traditions of the medium. An inveterate traveler, her photographs from Iceland, Hawaii, the American Southwest, and elsewhere are at the core of her practice, but the finished works advance complex iterations of form and materiality while upending the orthodoxies of photography.
In early works, Wilson extruded elements from printed images, introducing dimensionality into the image field. Printing hundreds of images in a rented darkroom, she began transforming C-prints by ripping, folding, slicing and layering them. Commingling the prints with industrial materials such as drywall, concrete, steel and aluminum, Wilson pushed her compositions toward a raw physicality. She expanded her practice to include digital photography and emulsion transfers printed directly on steel and concrete. The sculptural photographs, often monumental in scale, may be freestanding or wall-hugging, rolled or cantilevered, on a pedestal or in a frame. Images of volcanic rock, palm trees, cliffs and craters are bisected by Corten steel plates, embedded in cement, or insinuated into the architecture. Her evolution as an artist has resulted in an oeuvre that transcends the conventions of both modern photography and sculpture, yielding works that embrace abstraction yet extol the beauty of the natural world.
Letha Wilson has exhibited at MASS MoCA, in North Adams, MA; De Cordova Sculpture Park and Museum; International Center for Photography; Bronx Museum of the Arts; and Socrates Sculpture Park, in New York; the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut; and Essl Museum, Klosterneuburg, Austria. Recent projects include an outdoor public sculpture commissioned by the Rochester Institute of Technology. Her residencies include Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, MacDowell, Yaddo, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and the Headlands Center for the Arts, among others.
Letha Wilson was interviewed in August, 2021, at her studio in Craryville, New York. Exhibition footage included in this profile was shot at the following venues: “Horizon Eyes,” solo show, 2018, Grimm Gallery, NY; “Vantage Points,” group show, 2020, Grimm Gallery, NY; “Valley of Fire,” solo show, 2021, Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris; “Re:Growth,” group show at Riverside Park, NY, 2021; “Light,” group show, Miles McEnery Gallery, NY, 2021.
“I went to Hunter College, and I kind of decided to start poking at the conventions of photography. And also, very specifically, that I’m going to work with landscape images, like landscape photography, because what is a contemporary landscape photograph? Can landscape photography move beyond Ansel Adams or a calendar image or this beautiful thing? And I think I was really kind of torn with the beauty of it and wanting to sort of wrestle with it and wanting to kind of destroy the beauty of it and this conflicting frustration, I think, with the flatness and almost inertness of a photograph compared to the actual experience of being in these places.”
“Last year I took welding classes and have been playing with the idea of making wall pieces that incorporate UV prints on steel. I was excited by the potential for the image to become quite sculptural but still hang on the wall, as well as the fact that I can fold these pieces in the metal brake in the shop and then weld them to hold them together.”
“I’m really interested in what are people’s assumptions about how something should be and then flip it upside down. So when I’m choosing a material or a process, a photograph isn’t supposed to do this. I’m kind of interested in subverting what people think the way it should be as a way to possibly open up their perspective.”
“I started making sculptures using elements from a landscape photograph. There might be a person or a car – a non-natural element – and I extruded them. I did a series called ‘Extrusions,’ in which elements came out of the photograph, as if the photograph was actually breaking out of the photograph. I remember installing one of the pieces - it was very liberating.”
