The Landscape is Sanctuary to Our Fears: Marion Wilson

Marion Wilson's temporary home studio, New York City

New York City-based artist Marion Wilson has offered one of the most moving accounts of experiences with Covid-19, Interviewed by Elisa Wouk Almino  in Hyperallergic (4/3/20), the artist remarks,

"Two months ago, my father died of complications from pneumonia. It could have been a case of very early COVID-19. We won’t ever know, and it doesn’t really matter. I stayed with him during his last days, sleeping with my sister on a small hospital cot like when we were little kids. As his lungs were filling with liquid and right after he died, I photographed him. A month later, I began to paint these very intimate portraits of him, as well as his funeral bouquets.

Last week, I was diagnosed with COVID-19 by my doctor. Since that time, my world has gotten very small. Although the severest symptoms seem to have passed, I still feel lethargic. Unable to travel to my studio, I begin to look around my house for supplies. First, there are all those herbs that I am taking for my immune system, then there are the spices, the teas— and suddenly my bed is my studio table. Although my geographic footprint is small, my imagination keeps expanding. I seem to have discovered my shadow side — which is not to say I feel sad or lonely. Rather, I am noticing different details in my shadow; there is a kind of intimacy with myself in the quiet."

The Landscape is Sanctuary to Our Fears at William Paterson University

Photo by Jessica Talos

Wilson's beautiful, multi-layered exhibition, "The Landscape is Sanctuary to Our Fears," opened January 27, 2020 in New Jersey's William Patterson University galleries. It closed prematurely due to the state-wide shelter in place policy, brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic.  The exhibition endures in the memories of those who saw it or subsequently learned of it.  In retrospect, many aspects of the project, which incorporates Wilson's drawings, photographs, and installations of artifacts and herbaria, may be understood as anticipatory of the current state of emergency, and as proposing a glimpse of the new world, yet to be, that might just emerge in the wake of our transformative global moment, as so much hangs in the balance. 

Marion Wilson.

River

2020, Jacquard machine punched cards

Courtesy of the artist

The Landscape is Sanctuary to our Fears explores bodies of water in and around Patterson, NJ and the broader northeastern United States, as a meditative encounter with personhood, remembrance, environment, and urban space in the era of rapid climate change.  Her point of departure is the long-form poem Paterson. by William Carlos Williams. in which the poet characterizes the city as a man, in constant opposition to subordinated nature. The city of Patterson emerged, in Williams' telling, through the mechanical domination of the water flows of the Passaic river's Great Falls (referenced in River, 2020), to power its silk mills.

In contrast, Wilson considers the city as a woman inextricably woven into the liquid webs of nature. While classic patriarchal visions of the city understood the polis as dominating bodies of water--Athens or Venice as lords of the seas, London commanding the Thames, New York towering over the Hudson--Wilson envisions urban space as inherently fluid, protean, even liquid-like.  Her cities stand not in solid opposition to nature or to the acquatic, but as ebbing and flowing with the rhythms of the tides, the lapping of waves, and the unexpected channels cut by streams, rivers and storm surges. Her cities are not solid, up-jutting solid masses, but spaces of circulation and re-immersion, inviting us into dreamlike memory palaces that continuously reconnect us with other times and places, binding us to earlier struggles as we navigate our way forward.

Seen through the lens of the unfolding pandemic, Wilson's project may be understood as an important corrective to the habits of thinking and practice that over-determined, one might argue, our current crisis. The fantasy of the city, or of civilization, as impermeably rising above nature and simply dominating the waters upon which all life depends, is clearly untenable. The rapid expansion of the neo-tropics in the age of the Anthropocene, massive logging and destruction of old growth forests, manifold assaults on biodiversity, unplanned urban sprawl, military conflict and ecocide that drive global refugee migration, and the wholesale international trafficking of endangered species, all combine to increase the likelihood of zootics, as emerging viruses and other pathogens jump from animal species to human hosts. Economic systems predicated on the domination of nature and the relentless extraction of labor power from low income workers produce circumstances that virtually guarantee the production of viral hotspots, ravaging precarious human communities of laborers. (Consider, for example, the much discussed status of meat packing plants that primarily employ new migrants under substandard conditions, as accelerated petri dishes for the dissemination of the novel coronavirus.)

Marion Wilson
40.9503 N, 72.4052 W
(Lake Hopatcong, NJ), 2019

Digital print on painted mylar
17x26 in.
image courtesy of the artist

In contrast, Wilson plunges into pools of collective and individual memory to recover an alternate history of labor, from the important 1913 strike in Patterson (in which 1,800 strikers were arrested) to the activist sensibilities she imbibed from her own progressive parents. She honors equally the labor of micro and macro-invertebrates in the fresh and saltwater bodies of water from Maine to New Jersey, who have long helped cleans toxins and replenish local ecosystems. Work, as experienced in her interwoven installations of human and non-human organic processes, is, or at least could be, predicated not on hierarchies of exploitation but on coordinated integration of energies, organized through a delicate choreography of reciprocity, exchange, and emergence.

Marion Wilson, Red Mulberry Tree, 2019

Thus, her Red Mulberry Tree, 2019,  honoring the lifeform that sustained the silkworms that produced the silk threads that generated Patterson's wealth, is not a towering solid form but a quivering, pulsating matrix of energies, in which spreading leaves and munching silkworms merge into one another, birthing the lines of silk thread radiating from the tree's trunk. 

Work in this deepest sense is intimately bound to the labor of memory; in an exhibition component, the Waters of my Childhood, she takes us on deep dives into bodies of water she knew growing up, immersing us in visions of delicate, life-restoring balance that might guide us through the coming deluge. The artist's process rests on collaboration with scientists, historians, museum professionals and activists, a reminder of the webs of solidarity, imagination, and insight we will need to solve the coming crises born of climate change and environmental destruction.

Marion Wilson
Untitled, 2020
Artist’s work samples, 2019
Variable dimensions
Courtesy of the artist

Wooden textile cart
Early 20th century
33 3⁄4 x 48 x 19 inches
Courtesy of the Paterson Museum

Along the way, we encounter new visions of what the process of art making might become, as we move from fixed, hierarchical sites of cultural production to more peripatetic, circulatory, and distributed modes of creation. I am particularly enamored with Wilson's old textile cart, filled with art supplies: in the era we might be about to enter, this could be read as a call for art creation in extemporaneous, improvisational modes, as art-making is no longer confined to a few privileged sites but rather constantly on the move, the common right of all humankind.

Presciently named, The Landscape is Sanctuary to our Fears sadly closed its doors before its time. Yet as a memory picture--of earlier city-human-water-nature integrations, and as a prophetic vision of how we might yet reweave our troubled world--the exhibition remains a life-sustaining gift to us all.  Our fears right now are enormous, and surely tempt us to retreat into private walled, fortress city-states, hidden away from nature's chaotic energies. Alternately, inspired by Marion Wilson's memories of water and the shimmering life forms nurtured within it, we might venture forth to help build that better world, of a civilization that itself is an endlessly expansive sanctuary, predicated on labors that ebb and flow with nature's own fluid cycles of death, transformation and the regeneration of life.