CHASE WILSON | SPEECHES AND STILL LIVES

November 11 - December 11, 2018. Opening Reception: November 11th, 7-10pm

Artist Curated Projects and AM Gallery are pleased to announce Speeches and Still Lives, an exhibition of new paintings by Chase Wilson. This is Wilson’s second solo exhibition in Los Angeles. Wilson, who splits his time between Southern California and the Bay Area, completed the works on view during a recent intensive stay in an Oakland studio.  Produced not far from where the artist grew up, and in an area where he maintains ties, Wilson’s new paintings further his interests in representational and figurative genres including landscape painting, scene painting, still-life, and portraiture, while moving in a particularly personal direction with inclusions of family, a close friend, and the artist himself.

In these works in oil on canvas, observational painting jostles with and slides among gestural interventions, distortions, fictions and improvisations. The paintings include the surroundings of his basement studio: piping, a doorway, extension cords, painting tools, the colors of artificial lighting, still-lives made of objects belonging to him, portraits from photos and from life. In the circumstance of these paintings passages painted from observation take on the character of quotations. Speech and thought events emerge from large gestural marks. The paintings encircle with questions: What is? … communication, internal discourse, sound and the voice, painting in terms of writing, water/fluidity, escape, and animal symbolism. The paintings are of unknowable things: a text with many authors, a public reading not attended, a dead fish found in the supermarket, an off limits open doorway, the script that can never be seen.

Chase Wilson was born in Oakland CA in 1990, and grew up in Berkeley/Oakland. He earned his BFA in art at Cornell University in 2012, and completed his MFA in the MFA Painting and Printmaking program at Yale University in 2018.  Wilson lives and works between the Bay Area and Los Angeles.