Installation view of the east wall of the gallery. Image credit: Geoff Wichert

Her name may be a bit superfluous: surely no one would question that Laura Wilson is sharp as well as Sharp—sharper than many of us who write about her. Calling her recent body of work “Chiasma” revealed her to be acquainted with the latest genetic science, which is far more demanding than rockets, and sent her critics searching after what turned out to be a challenging and not very helpful definition for something small, yet very crucial. What was missed is that she also possesses the wit of a poet, and that the title is a metaphor. A chiasma is a crossover point, like the meeting place of the two strokes of an X, and it has a literary cousin in Percy Shelley’s famous chiasmus: “Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.” What you see coming will always look different after it passes.

A chiasma or chiasmus of sorts is contained in what may be the first thing a viewer sees in Gilding the Lily: A Choreography, Wilson’s polyphonic extravaganza currently in what might be called the West Gallery or “Sunset Room” at Finch Lane. This long rectangle poses a challenge to an artist, since its largest, eastern wall is pierced by its two entrances, so that whatever is hung on it cannot be seen in full until the viewer enters fully and turns about. Some artists compensate by putting their main work on a smaller end wall, but Wilson chose to use the doorway nearest the main entrance to frame what may well be her thematic statement, a six-foot tall poster intriguingly titled “Tired Roaches Moon.”

Laura Sharp Wilson, “Tired Roaches Moon” at Finch Lane Gallery. Image credit: Geoff Wichert

Everything about the woman in the poster seems pointedly chosen, including her formal dress, ornamental hat, and the gold chain that runs from her hand to a pile of links on the floor. A script on her torso reads “You Do Not Have Time To Make Enough Money,” which chiasmatically can be read two ways. Since time is inadequate, should we spend all of it making as much money as possible? Or should we forego the futile pursuit and focus on the best use of the time? This Hobson’s choice may also explain her dour expression.

Wilson might additionally feel she’s produced more than her fair share of subsistence art in an effort to earn sufficient money to buy enough time to create what she must know she’s capable of. “Made and made and made,” she writes. So “Gilding the Lily” just might refer to elevating so much merely remembered effort by bringing it into the gallery as part of her candidly honest curriculum vitae. The dissonance comes as no surprise, considering that she has also crafted what is surely one of the finest visual representations of fundamental reality since Jackson Pollock’s drips put America on the world’s fine art map. That assertion may sound like a species of lunacy, but maybe not so much to those familiar with her decades of mind-bogglingly complex mixtures of textile structures and botanical illustrations.

Utah had its first opportunity to see what she can do around 2010, when works like her gouache-on-paper “No Signs for Utah” began showing up. She’d been making art since the ’70s, when as an immigrant child she’d discovered that her talent could make up for her lack of a background shared with her schoolmates. Over time, she found any number of ways to parlay her technical skills into a living, even as her hyperactive mind served largely to entertain her and her friends, as so often happens with autodidacts. In the years since her emergence here she came close to breaking through, going so far as to set up a studio at Poor Yorick, perhaps the most common denominator among Salt Lake City’s more dedicated artists. Unfortunately, in what was hardly her only setback, a divorce forced her to trade that promising location for one where she can also live: a choice that might sound ideal to anyone who has never had to attempt it.

Laura Sharp Wilson, “No Signs for Utah,” 2009

When Wilson began her career, artists rarely spoke of having one. A list of odd jobs was a better resumé than one of academic degrees. During her lifetime, though, art increasingly became a profession, and she acquired an impressive array of credentials: BFA from Carnegie Mellon; MFA from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. More helpful may have been an apprenticeship at the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia. A series of residencies commenced in 2018 at the Golden Foundation and continued at Salt Lake City’s Huntsman Cancer Institute from 2019 to 2022. Normally, I don’t include those details, which are easily found in the public record, but except for the last one, she doesn’t make a point of mentioning them either. In fact, as a walk through Gilding the Lily will show, she views her career in a far different, and arguably more “contemporary” light.

In her statement, she refers to a discovery made at the Huntsman, where “creativity was used as a tool for health and healing,” and then expanded upon as “Creative Aging Coordinator” at the Utah Museum of Fine Art. What she found was nothing less than how, “The opportunity to share my relationship to creativity with others has been life changing.” It would be presumptuous to discuss such a discovery here if she hadn’t made a point of its role in Gilding the Lily. Those of us who have followed her art closely know that within the last few years, those covered by the work at Finch Lane, she stood at the threshold of a major step forward in her career. The work she did in those years, largely at another residency that she chose not to mention, was a breakthrough even for her. One day she may choose to tell the story of what happened, but after testing the waters of a new level of public recognition, she seems to have chosen a different path.

Installation view of “Gilding the Lily.” Image credit: Geoff Wichert.

Laura Sharp Wilson, “Escape.” Image credit: Geoff Wichert

The hints at Finch Lane are anything but subtle. “Love Aging and Dying!” “Older is Gold!” Respect the Elders!” And on the opposite wall, six botanical forms done in her unmistakeable style, titled “Escape,” and seeming to depict the roots of plants that managed to grow through a crack and, as plants so often do, resumed their lives on the other side as if it were all part of a normal day’s activity.

Eventually, then, it becomes clear how the entire room is a single installation. Near the poster where it arguably commences, a botanical ring surrounds a possible self-portrait in which the bandage-covered head of a woman in a kimono is one of nine knotted and connected balls of yellow cord or tape. While it presents her as part of something, a network of objects who, like her, may be on to something significant, it also presents her as blinded and silenced by the experience.

And then there’s the main show, an untitled tableau with a pair of upended purses from which are falling what might or might not be the symbolic contents of Pandora’s Box. Between the two repudiated purses, an exotic but not unbelievable floral form unfolds its glory amidst a shower of golden raindrops. Twisting in space are a pair of strands on which what appear like pimento-stuffed olives rotate in the breeze stirred by passing audience members. Among the largely botanical creatures assembled are proofs that in nature, beauty makes its way on functional, rather than less useful principles.

Laura Sharp Wilson, “See Me.” Image credit: Geoff Wichert

After contemplating all that has led to this point, what comes to this mind, at least, is a conundrum about so-called Contemporary Art. Today’s artists, to a degree not seen since the rise of Modernism, espouse an ethical standard for their art. Social, cultural, ethnic, and similar other concerns abound. Art doesn’t just want to be good; it wants to do good. And yet artists are still mostly offered the same Malthusian struggle in a zero-sum pursuit for recognition and advancement. The solution cannot lie in capitulation, either to the pursuit of success or its abandonment. Surely Laura Sharp Wilson and her colleagues would prefer to make a decent living, as would nurses, custodians, and teachers—which is the way many of them, including Wilson, would prefer to define themselves. As a goal, to make art and earn a respectable living at it sounds worth taking along on the next project, and the next.

Gilding the Lily: A Choreography, Finch Lane Gallery, Salt Lake City, through Apr. 19. Receptions: Mar. 15 & Apr. 19, 6-9 pm.

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.