chatted about / archive / a hard baby cleans / a passenger / blown cover / christ and spiderman / democracy now / fall / fixation object / fruit / hagia sophia / laptop masturbation / lurker / pietà / six-headed entangled figure / sleep noises / triple vision / untitled (shirt)

When discussing his works on paper, Wilson Yerxa describes the importance of point of view. He distinguishes the point of view that his paintings and drawings inhabit from the first-person perspective, the “I” language that characterizes much of poetry.

The application of 1-, 2- and 3-point perspective in Renaissance painting became a way of organizing the world. Rather than this organization of the world cohering to a natural sense of what things were, it was used to create pictorial schemas, ordered and hierarchical space, leading the viewers’ eyes to the most important facets of the pictured scene. Thus, rather than utilizing point of view (in the sense of being an artistic tool) to foster scientific objectivity, it instead served the purpose of constructing spatialized narratives and meaning within the composition.

What happens, then, when instead of occupying a single point of view a painting or drawing utilizes multiple and shifting sightlines? By deploying what we might call shifting points of view and multiple lines of sight, Wilson’s work plays against the objectivity of illusory painterly representations. Take his Laptop Masturbation piece.

A piece that epitomizes Wilson’s working style—one that is reassembled, reoriented, and altered over time in the deferral of a finalized state—this collage compromises the idea that the viewer can totally comprehend this work from a singular point of view. While the clothes hanger suggests a vertical surface, an article of fabric hung so that it parallels the viewer’s upright position, the perspective of the lap abruptly inverts the coat-hanger’s position. Instead of looking at things hung vertically, the viewer is also looking down, as if on their own thighs. But this perspective is also impossible; the hand emerges from beneath the thighs, making the appendage emerge from an impossible space. The amphibious coat-hanger, on the other hand, appears to come from a worm’s-eye perspective with the viewer situated low and gazing at an overhead scene. Further compounding the sense of disorientation is the view of a figure’s back, shoulders, and their head, which confuses either an upright or top-down point of view.

By combining multiple points of view rather than creating illusory space for the one, for the stably situated beholder, I see Wilson’s work as engaging in a kind of play, a play of distance between himself as subject and object of his representational paintings.

In his Democracy Now piece, rather than doing a full-on portrait, Wilson seems to capture an impossible view of himself: the top of his skull, with the lower face foreshortened to exaggerate the nose, the brow, and the scalp. This painting treats his body as an object, an object that must be viewed from every angle in order to understand it. Looking at oneself from outside oneself is further suggested in Wilson’s incorporation of the news organization and program Democracy Now, which is half-hidden inside his folded pants. Wilson’s body is as much an object of viewing as the Democracy Now logo and the semi-abstracted coil of what look like intestinal shapes overlaid on the denim.

By distancing himself from his body, Wilson’s pieces work against what Delueze and Guattari call facialization. Facialization is the tendency to view an individual’s subjectivity, their personhood and identity as concentrated in the face and its features while ignoring the rest of the body. Deleuze and Guattari link the centrality of the face to a dominant figure in Western representation: the face of Christ. The face as religious and heroic, especially for prominent men in Western culture, is evident in Wilson’s Christ and Spiderman piece. However, Wilson also inverts this heroism by attaching his own transparent, Leonardo-esque head to the work.

Wilson’s head, rendered on what appears to be tracing paper, is tacked onto Spiderman fighting criminals and Christ leading the surgeons. Whereas these figures as rendered from what appear to be full-frontal views that indicate their literal stature and centralize them, Wilson’s reproduced image of himself almost fades from view, tacked like a template for a clothing design or pattern onto the mesh undergarment.

In addition to reading shifts in points of view as literal features of the work’s compositions, we might consider shifting point of view and perspective in terms of Wilson’s recycled, repurposed paper pulp pieces and fabric items. Rather than abiding by the single use of a sheet or paper or a shift, the artist enfolds multiple possible uses into the piece, as old paper and mesh underwear are reconstituted as surfaces to hold paint and be rearranged on a wall.

Instead of merely being surfaces, Wilson’s works again acquire the status of objects with rippling, fragile paper materiality, and contours that can be clipped with clothes pins. While such a fragility might indicate vulnerability—especially in Wilson’s rendering of a figure whose anus is exposed and turned toward the viewer—it is joined with a sense of humor. As if paintings as objects, beheld somewhat at a distance rather than as Renaissance illusory portals into which the viewer is immersed and inculcated with a sense of world, allow the artist and viewer to come at the pieces with a sense of distance. This distance does not become a form of uneasy alienation so much as offsetting the self-deprecation in Wilson’s vulnerable poses with pathos, endearment for the subject/object on display. Another of Wilson’s pieces inverts the usual anthropomorphic perspective with the view of a cat, which returns in this graphite drawing.

Going back to Deleuze and Guattari’s location of subjectivity in the face, here the human face is hidden while the cat’s is exposed. How does the cat view its human who stoops to retrieve items like belongings or food for the feline? Does this cat watch with a sense of bemusement, of reveling in the banality and absurdity of human bodies, gestures, and choices? And does its sense of itself occur in relation to the human or does it view the human as something else entirely, a separate and autonomous object for consideration?