Ayse Wilson
I'm Still Here
2021

Name: I'm Still Here
Brand: Ayse Wilson
Price: 7000 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

Ayse Wilson is a Turkish-American artist who lives and lives and works in Connecticut. Her work draws from memory and emotion to remind viewers of youth, innocence and the timeless space we occupy when we are young. She creates lively and childlike characters, finding inspiration in the works of early Italian Renaissance masters such as Fra Angelico. Wilson graduated from Wellesley College in 1991, and pursued her education in Florence. She received her MFA at New York Academy of Art, and later worked as a painting assistant to Jeff Koons for two years. This current series employs the toile wallpaper samples that the artist had lying around her house during lockdown as a backdrop for ambiguous and complicated feelings toward quarantine and domestic confinement. In this work, she is hoping to narrate how fear of the pandemic unknown, coupled with household anxieties, and increased self-awareness contributed to the mixed emotions of security and hostility towards enforced domesticity within a masked world. The toile tradition represented a coincidental parallel with the COVID era rediscovery of old-fashioned pastoral lifestyles, and the embrace of self-reliant artisanal practices like cooking, gardening, sewing, and prescribed homeschooling. Her colorful inscriptions, some original, some appropriated, layer in our contemporary lifestyle, our modern methods of connectivity as well as our high-tech world. The punky playfulness of the neon and fluorescents contrasts with the backdrop of Fragonard-esque imagery and hopes to delivery her messages of love and connection, awareness and newness, hope and emotions, as well as the occasional glossily veiled hostility expressed in certain so-called “love” declarations. The phrases evolved from a previous series addressing the Me Too movement, such as “Because I Like it Like That” and “That’s The Way I Like It” which address the need for empowerment based on feeling and intuition, as opposed to concrete reasoning or regulatory traditions. For example, “No means No.” No need to explain. Wilson began incorporating text in her paintings because she felt that as we increasingly use so much typed language to communicate, words themselves take on a new life form, visual cues and a voice of their own. They are visually powerful. The medium of this work is acrylic on painted wallpaper.

Creator:

Ayse Wilson (1970, American, Turkish)

Creation Year:

2021

Dimensions:

Height: 52 in (132.08 cm)Width: 42 in (106.68 cm)

Medium:

Paper,Acrylic

Movement & Style:

Contemporary

Period:

2010-