Mutual Theft | Gisela Projects

For this show I've invited artists and friends Sara Woster and Brian Wiggins to make a selection of each other's works. They've known each other for decades and have also been mutually inspired. Brian Wiggins on Sara Woster: Before I began looking at Sara Woster’s paintings for Mutual Theft, I made the decision that I would look at them first free of narrative or subject matter and only look for similarities of form in color, space, and the overall structure of each painting. I also took notes of the experience to keep me on track with the directive that our use of color is why Mutual Theft exists as a show. We mutually have consciously and unconsciously stolen from each other (and others) for years. Art works that way. I’ve known Sara’s art for almost twenty years so I knew this wouldn’t be easy, but I felt that I would uncover something that I hadn’t experienced in her work, and that’s exactly what happened. I’m not saying it was an emotional experience, but it was, and I was genuinely surprised by their openness. A silhouette is mass with no light. Everything is dark, but well lit. Illuminated as to show the lightness. The lightness is levitation and luminosity. It’s as if the light that generates the matter loses any gravitational bearing and things just float upward and away. There is no anger, no judgement, no weight; what a beautiful way to live. Sara Woster on Brian Wiggins: As we prepared to write these essays about each other’s paintings Gisela sent us some text from a Richard Tuttle interview where Tuttle said “dialogue is the glue of the social matrix”. It was an interesting thing to read when immersing myself in Brian’s paintings, artworks steeped in conversations between color and line, painterly marks and marks pretending to be straight edges. Hidden in his colorful palette there is usually some taunting, some tensions, some lines fighting their way off the edge of the canvas. I have always thought that Brian’s works are best viewed as a group when his lines can escape the plane that was intended to contain them in order to find a new tension or conversation with the marks on the painting next door. A line leaves a canvas here and enters another one there. A thought bubble pops up in one, disappears in the next. The artist’s dedication to this conversation within a single painting and with the paintings surrounding is the result of thoughtful playing with line and color. The paintings might be playful but the labor of his work is always evident. Painting is nothing but tweaking and perfecting, making a good painting is a tedious obligation, and Brian always makes sure to give us a hint of that process in his deliberate marks.