Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Connie Wilson
Canadian; 21st-century
Chicago, IL: Prairie Gallery (Exhibition: Dazzle Pig)
81%
Dazzle Pig. 2026. Deadstock fabric, MDF
I'm considering the exhibition in toto as a self-complete artwork whose form comprises the five discrete art objects listed on the checklist, as well as the physical, spatial, and semantic relationships between them. In this sense, Dazzle Pig is a small but definite success, as well as an indicator of certain salient formal problems in current art. Namely, the effectiveness of the exhibition derives from the playful, uncommitted relationship which its parts have to its whole. None of the show's four "pigs" (Wilson's name for her squat fabric-covered structures), nor their little balsa wood "Pig House" that hangs on the gallery's back wall, is quite distinguished enough on its own as an arrangement of forms to sustain close aesthetic scrutiny, yet the placement of all five objects together in the gallery manages to make substantial claims upon one's attention. This is of course a fairly pedestrian problem in terms simply of accounting for and appraising the work — if the primary experiential unit is the exhibition overall, then the exhibition overall is what ought to be evaluated — and it goes back, of course, at least to Minimalism and the 1960s. But there is a problem here which Wilson not only registers but actually attempts to treat aesthetically: namely, it is unavoidable that a group of individual artworks arranged in some kind of sequence will take on properties of and, to an extent, derive their significance and effects from the artworks surrounding them, and yet it is necessary, in accounting for our experiences with and interpretations of any art, to refer to individual aesthetic objects possessing unique formal properties that distinguish them from other such objects and thereby ground their specific meanings. This exhibition is distinctly not an "installation" but a collection of discrete, named, enumerated objects which are nevertheless nothing, aesthetically speaking, without the context which Wilson has created for them. Wilson blurs the lines that separate one work from another by means of seriality and structural repetition (techniques, again, that goes back decades in art's history), but her suggestion of the existence of an internally coherent taxonomical system (one whereby a red pig is "dead" whereas a green one is "deliberate") goes a step further towards this end. The exhibition's "pig" conceit, in a word, doesn't simply point to, but moreover hypostatizes slippery distinctions between one object, another object, and the space between them, while at the same time recognizing the functional necessity of such distinctions and maintaining them in practice. So perhaps I need to amend a point I made previously, the aesthetic unit here may not quite be the exhibition itself, nor is it exactly any one of the objects "in" the exhibition. Rather, it's the tiny fissure between, on the one hand, the discrete presence of each particular work, and, on the other, the collectivity to which each of these works belong and which serves as the foundation of their individual effects. There's nothing new, of course, about making art out of the space between clearly delimited physical objects and forms, but there is something that seems specific to our artistic present about the way that Wilson hits her notes: since art today is entirely bereft of the sorts of conceptions of historical development that could imbue artists' formal decisions with a sense of purpose and necessity, the tendency of Wilson's exhibition to deny its viewers a "proper" experiential mode — its squirrelliness regarding the basic questions of "how does one thing here fit with another?" and "how am I even supposed to relate to this?" — comes to seem itself like a necessary, if not the only possible, way of relating aesthetically to our world. Dazzle Pig constructs its own conditions of meaning and refuses us complete access to them; it is defensive and evasive because it has to be. (TFS, 2026)
Chicago, IL: Prairie Gallery (Exhibition: Dazzle Pig)
71%
Dumb Pig. 2026. Deadstock fabric, MDF
Of the four "pigs" in Wilson's exhibition, this is the one that, irrespective of the role it's playing within the exhibition as a whole, stands on its own most effectively. This is simply because it's more "worked up" than the others, with its unaccountable tassels of thinly cut fruit that seem to suggest the dumbness of its title without at all explaining it. In the basic form of the object there's an evident flirtation with historical Minimalism, which is undercut by the softness of the fabric, the representational implication inherent in the "pig" title, and the lovely little formalist flourish of the cardboard caps at each of the top corners. There's a whole history of cheeky postminimalism here (Robert Grosvenor, Carol Bove) which is adequately marshaled, if not quite overcome. (TFS, 2026)
Chicago, IL: Prairie Gallery (Exhibition: Dazzle Pig)
57%
Dead Pig. 2026. Deadstock fabric, MDF
It's not exactly in keeping with the aesthetic spirit of this exhibition to judge its component artworks on their own terms, but then again, each of Wilson's "pigs" is individually named and dated, suggesting that they have at least some artistic life of their own. Dead Pig is the weakest of the four (all of which have identical curved-ziggurat shapes and dimensions) only because it's unadorned (whereas Dumb Pig and Ditsy Pig have all these little flourishes that vivify their simple structure and that make its lopsided massing seem that much more palpably odd) and because its red is a bit too loud (the dull forest green of Deliberate Pig accentuates the squatness of the sculpture, making its slight elevation off the ground seem that much more unaccountable). Then again, the whole point of Dead Pig's red color is to complement the green of Deliberate Pig, which it mirrors in the gallery. So, criticizing Dead Pig at all sort of misses its point (but is it a chink in the exhibition’s armor that its artistic conceit demands that its components be considered as discrete works of art?). (TFS, 2026)