Amy Wilson has developed an ensemble cast of child-like female characters inhabiting a storybook-like world. These lithe, nearly identically dressed girls morph into several manifestations of the artist’s voice as they communicate their thoughts, fears, hopes and dreams through text. In each scene, the characters tackle diverse subjects such as politics, art, science, and metaphysics; however, an overarching theme of the struggle between individual will versus political conscience seems to be present. The text is confessional, intellectual, psychological, topical, and diaristic.

The following is a statement from the artist’s website, www.amy-wilson.com:

Over the last few years, my work has become about the space that exists between what we can roughly describe as the “outside world” and the “inside world”; the space that comes to define who we are in a thousand tiny ways, some conscious and some not. I use the image of the industrious little girl (in many cases, several in a single drawing) to be a surrogate for myself and see my work to be, in many ways, an exercise in self-portraiture. I play with the tension between the sweet images, pretty girls, simple palette, and the honest and (I hope) fearless conversations they have as a way of both exploring femininity as a broad concept, and also my internal life in particular.

For her first solo exhibition at BravinLee programs, Wilson has created an installation that literally pops out of a book and unfolds throughout the gallery. The new pop-up book marks the first occasion the artist has worked in such a scale with this particular medium, and will be the centerpiece of the exhibition alongside her new drawings.

Amy Wilson is a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and holds a MFA from Yale University. She has exhibited at P.S.1, The Drawing Center, The Jersey City Museum, Bellwether Gallery, and The Andy Warhol Museum. In winter 2009, she will have a solo exhibition at the Hunterdon Art Museum in Clinton, New Jersey.