7.24.24 — Fun, Fun, Fun
Paula Wilson serves up not just a show, but a compendium of her art. At a time when nontraditional materials have become a priority, she brings no shortage of those as well, at Bortolami through August 30.
Now that weaving has become an assertion of women’s work as fine art, she leads straight to what must surely pass for just that. It might be a self-portrait, only larger than life, or an empty dress. At a time, too, when glass and ceramics have attained dignity as art and design, she gives the media a history in stained glass. Steel tracery outlines an image, while gallery light passes through like sunlight. 
At least it seems to do so, in a show called “The Wind Keeps Time,” where first impressions may soon be gone with the wind. Wilson has a reputation as a mixed-media artist, and the show includes video as well, but she is still a painter with a trust in imagery. I first encountered her in summer group shows in 2013, with an entire catalog, as I wrote then, of painting, architecture, and remembered pleasures. She executed it, though, in tapestry, or so I think, but it simulated bricks, grillwork, decorative reliefs, and graffiti. Here what looks like something else entirely is most likely a print or acrylic. Only a true painter would see its potential for imagery and light.
That portrait stands face front at the center of the back wall, at the gallery’s second, shared space up the block from its first. The rest fills the room in front of it, largely apart from the walls. If that suggests a chapel dedicated to the artist herself or to women, that includes the simulated stained glass. It frames a girl’s image as well, the silhouette of a dancer in sunlight. It might almost be a magazine clipping—and the entire show a kind of collage. Wilson can make pretentious claims, but as free play.
Virginia Overton, too, takes materials off the wall as something tangible and a place to play. Her 2016 terrace sculpture for the new Whitney Museum gave it a reflecting pool or perhaps a real one. Her 2018 summer sculpture in Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens turned brown steel into a swing. She also parked the very symbol of American freedom out front. Did that mean a car? She may not have taken one to the principal space for Wilson’s gallery, but then Tribeca parking is a nightmare.
You may find yourself thinking of cars facing silvery metal inside the gallery. You may feel the momentum of a moving car from its physical presence as well, through August 9. Her most impressive work fills the long central wall with foot-wide strips of it, rippling across the space. A smaller work fills three walls of a side room. Up close from the moment one enters, it demands attention to beaten metal and to every bolt. Thin, darker beams curve apart from an apex at the top, held together by a clip even as they threaten to fly away.
Overton has salvaged them all from the archetype of the great American highway, a sign, which she disassembled strip by strip, beam by beam, and bolt by bolt. The gallery’s Web site shows none of this—only cars parked outside an establishment that I hope never to patronize. Puzzling or not, it rings true. The house number on the building behind them even matches that of a pricier Tribeca dealer right across the street. Park yourself inside to relish the shine before it fades. Art will have fun, fun, fun till her daddy takes the T-bird away.