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  Marion Wilson
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  The following essay by Donna Harkavy, accompanies the exhibiton, Remnants of Luxury in Forbidden Play.

Marion Wilson's art traverses the charged, multivalent terrain of childhood and identity. With the eye of a knowing observer, she captures a darkly innocent side of growing up. Her diminutive figures and toy guns inhabit the periphery of such taboo territory as cross dressing and violence. Of course, within the realm of childhood, aggressive play is playing war and wearing clothes of the opposite sex is simply dressing up. But viewed through an adult perspective, these "innocent" games are tinged by the forbidden.

All of Wilson's bronze babies are cast from the same anatomically correct, newborn male doll. The impetus for working in bronze came from a desire to find her place in the lineage of sculpture, to better understand its role as a commemorative medium, and to critique its heroic stature. In an earlier series, the artist clad the babies in armor. Here, her clearly male figures are femininely costumed in the remnants of luxurious beaded lace, scraps of chenille borders, or other heavily textured fabrics. Each outfit loosely suggests a different ethnicity, though Wilson deliberately kept the facial features and skin tones fairly neutral. In fact, these figures, such as Blushing Yaksa, were inspired by Indian bronze sculpture with its embodiment of male and female attributes, its fusion of the secular and the divine, and its celebration of plasticity and ornamentation. In Wilson's hands, ornamentation becomes the means to impress a cultural narrative onto the figures, a way to try on different identities. Her delight in ornamentation and pattern, and her experiments with "cultural hybridity" are also evident in a recent suite of monotypes. Layers of pattern decorate infant bodies like elaborate tattoos and form imaginative headdresses, each its own cultural marker. There is, too, a hint of violence in the blood red stains and the enigmatic object held by a few of the babies. Whether rattle or weapon is not entirely clear. Guns for Newborns, six bronze, pacifier-sized guns with patterned surfaces reminiscent of medieval weaponry, is similarly unsettling in its intimations of aggression.

Perhaps the most overtly autobiographical objects in the exhibition are the translucent, cast-resin purses filled with items of significance to the artist including her husband's wisdom teeth, small religious statues, and an emotionally laden letter from her stepmother. As in her other work, Wilson creates an open-ended, enigmatic narrative. The barely discernable bits and pieces contained within this miniature baggage seem to emerge, like distant memories, from the deep recesses of her psyche.

Donna Harkavy
Independent curator and writer



The following essay, accompanies the exhibition Distilled Lives at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY, May 2-June 29, 2003.

Distilled Lives, an installation by artist Marion Wilson, is a subtle yet layered exploration of issues surrounding the death penalty. The installation is comprised of discrete vignettes that reproduce the last meals chosen by five condemned criminals. By selecting this seemingly anecdotal angle, Wilson is able to engage a large subject at a very human point; after all, we all have our favorite foods. Among the artist's infamous subjects are Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh; serial killer Ted Bundy; Beverly Allitt, a British nurse convicted of killing thirteen babies; Manuel Pina Babbitt, a decorated Viet Nam War veteran and murderer; and Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi war criminal.

Wilson's interest in this subject was sparked by a news story that appeared soon after the execution of Timothy McVeigh that detailed the last meal he ate before receiving the lethal injection that ended his life. McVeigh had changed his request several times before settling on two pints of mint chocolate-chip ice cream. A related story that had resonance for Wilson concerned a nun who opposed McVeigh's execution, despite being a survivor of the Oklahoma bombing. These two news items encompass some of the key themes that the artist decided to explore in this installation, including the issues of forgiveness, revenge, irony, social ritual, and institutionalized brutality.

Although Wilson seeks out specific information on each of her subjects, she filters this research through an ingrained aesthetic that is informed by Conceptual and post-Pop art practices. For instance, she employs a variety of media to portray the readily-identifiable still-life objects that both symbolize her subjects' last meals and reference aspects of their criminal situation. For Wilson, the careful choice of materials furthers the potential for meaning in her work. Among the media she uses are cast iron, bronze, and plastic, melting ice cream, a facsimile of cut glass, digital prints, and small somber paintings. Technique, too, plays a conceptual role: The casting processes that Wilson employs for the majority of the work alludes to notions of presence and absence, volume and void, and the very human metaphors of body and nobody. Other formal strategies include massing and repetition, the use of text, and a conscious manipulation of gallery-display practices.

The McVeigh section of the installation is the only one to employ actual foodstuff. In this case, two open-worked bronze replicas of pint containers are packed with ice cream; they sit on a block of dry ice, which in turn is placed on a distressed plaster column. Over the course of a day, the dry ice dissipates and the ice cream melts-a physical process Wilson sees as echoing what happens in death. On a wall nearby this transformation hangs a small, cast-bronze replica of Leonardo's Last Supper. Wilson finds the connection between the two meals to be inescapable, if, ultimately, converse in meaning: "The Last Supper, as I understand it," she explains, "was about sacrifice or forgiveness; it preceded a kind of martyrdom." Although the practice of allowing the condemned a final meal derives from uncertain origins, most indications point to secular custom rather than biblical influence. Hence, the last meal offered to the condemned becomes, in the artist's words, "a strange equation," a macabre irony that provides cruel comfort.

In another section of the installation, three full-scale, cast-iron replicas of cafeteria trays and mugs symbolize the disproportionate number of anonymous minority convicts who face the death penalty-in this case represented by Manuel Pina Babbitt. Babbitt, a murderer turned in by his brother (like Unabomber Ted Kaczynski), was an African-American veteran, whose defendants claimed was suffering from post-traumatic stress. Unlike Kaczynski, who is white and sentenced to life imprisonment, Babbitt was put to death by lethal injection. In actuality, Babbitt did not have a last meal: he declined the offer and fasted, instead.

Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi officer who engineered the Holocaust, also refused a last meal and in its place drank half a bottle of red wine before his hanging. Wilson has created a still-life arrangement of three highly-polished, cast-bronze goblets along with a bottle made of the same material that bears a red patina. Each element is repeatedly pierced with symbols associated with the Holocaust (Stars of David, swastikas, or crosses), which renders them incapable of containing any liquid. This arrangement is accompanied by twelve small-scale, black-and-white dust paintings, arranged in a grid on the wall. Largely nonobjective and minimally defined, these images provide a ghostly witness to the representation of Eichmann's final sustenance.

In the section of the installation devoted to nurse Beverly Allitt, Wilson complicates a narrow reading of the subject by referring not to the last meal of the murderer, but to the meals uneaten by her thirteen innocent victims. Here, the artist masses cast-plastic replicas of children's spoons, knives, and forks, glasses of milk, and small milk cartons. The objects' faded pastel coloration and their chunky, nonfunctional form convert these playroom staples into commemorative symbols.

Stark and minimal formal choices like these reflect certain aspects of the death-penalty controversy that Wilson hopes to highlight, but her objects are presented without overt commentary. Rather than support a particular side of this contentious debate, Wilson intends her work to encourage discourse around the issues she set out to explore. Although she hopes to engage the viewer intellectually, Wilson also seeks to provide an encompassing sensate experience, one that can be felt as well as read.


Thomas Piche Jr.
Senior Curator of the Everson Museum of Art