Adherence II/Breakage I and Adherence I/Breakage II, digital video projections, photo transfers on masking tape, spackle and gallery paint, and accompanied sound loops, varied size, 2021
Breakage I, digital video, 2020
Breakage II, digital video, 2021
Installation Description
The video and sound installation displayed in Wilson Minshall's Thesis exhibition titled Interstice: Flexure contains videos projected onto wall-scale disrupted grids and 4 speakers filling the projection rooms. The simultaneous removal and haunting presence of degrading archival material is reflected in the accompanying sound pieces, which are 5 tracks played randomly on a loop. These sound pieces are comprised of samples from Wilson's personally accumulated archive; field recordings from their everyday life, snippets of their voice, and sounds from the endings of records and films, which are subtly manipulated together. The particular method of manipulation employed in the sound pieces is granular and cross granular synthesis. This digital sound manipulation process is where a binary sound source (a digital audio file) is split into small grains, which are rearranged, stretched, and reorganized, resulting in an evaporating aural effect.
The expanding installation titled Adherence visually pulls from the documents of Wilson's previously erased Cherokee (Aniyunwiya) ancestors that had gone unacknowledged within their immediate family structure until the year 2020. The transfers are rooted from census records, Dawes rolls, and a Tsalagi-Yonega (Cherokee-English) dictionary that was passed down from the chief of Cherokee nation to Wilson's father on May 15, 1976, and passed down to Wilson on their 24th birthday (also May 15th). Reinterpreting this point of connection, however tangential or disregarded, engages a textual location and relation, and an opening or bend within systems of history and identification. Carefully hand-binding pieces of archival masking tape together, Wilson constructs intricate photo-transfer strips to pursue a metaphorical “hidden fold” of histories within the grounds of their works. These individual strands are scanned and rendered in stop motion videos, which are paired with immersive sound collages in the gallery to activate the space between and across present events and concrete renderings of the past.
The expanding installation titled Adherence visually pulls from the documents of Wilson's previously erased Cherokee (Aniyunwiya) ancestors that had gone unacknowledged within their immediate family structure until the year 2020. The transfers are rooted from census records, Dawes rolls, and a Tsalagi-Yonega (Cherokee-English) dictionary that was passed down from the chief of Cherokee nation to Wilson's father on May 15, 1976, and passed down to Wilson on their 24th birthday (also May 15th). Reinterpreting this point of connection, however tangential or disregarded, engages a textual location and relation, and an opening or bend within systems of history and identification. Carefully hand-binding pieces of archival masking tape together, Wilson constructs intricate photo-transfer strips to pursue a metaphorical “hidden fold” of histories within the grounds of their works. These individual strands are scanned and rendered in stop motion videos, which are paired with immersive sound collages in the gallery to activate the space between and across present events and concrete renderings of the past.