Letha Wilson Seeks Common Ground

Ahead of the unveiling of a new commission for display at Mackage stores in New York and Paris, this video visits Letha Wilson at her studio. Living and working between the frenetic pace of New York City and the rural calm upstate, her work intertwines these two worlds and embraces moments they press against one another. ‘I’m often thinking about materials that have this dual relationship between construction, the human, architecture, and nature’ the artist comments, ‘like a 2x4 coming from a tree, or drywall being made of crushed rocks and paper’

This kind of transformation is central to the artist’s new collaboration with Mackage, for which details of great American landscapes are abstracted and reframed in a series of sculptural compositions incorporating original photography. The works exist first as card maquettes that Wilson carefully cuts, contorts, and reconstructs re-configuring for a display in successive seasons: Autumn and then Winter.

For the final in-store displays in each season, these experiments are transferred onto sheets of steel that are finished with industrial techniques such as boring and folding. ‘It’s fascinating to me that a photograph has a whole life after it's printed’, she adds, ‘it opens up all these possibilities that have a dialogue with the original image’. Ultimately, the meaning of the images comes from the viewer: ‘people bring their own experience of the landscape with them’.