Wilder Alison / Xio Martin

14 April – 20 May 2023
20 E Herman Street, Philadelphia PA 19144

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Wilder Alison (born Burlington, VT/works ???) Engaging with visual media and language gleaned largely from authorless sources, Alison’s work elaborates how pairing texts and images can subtly subvert – rather than encourage – the production of discrete identifications and narrative coherence. Alison deploys variations on this strategy – through painting, screen-printing, textiles, and music – to frame contemporary questions about labor, madness, gender, and sexuality. Alison also performs in collaboration with psychoanalyst and musician Monroe Street as N0 ST0NES.

Xio Martin (born/lives/works in Philadelphia, PA) “I tend to describe the format of my language/social acquisition as mechanical. These drawings were habituated first in lecture notation, assembling ideas in terms of functions of social hierarchies. Later, arising from circumstances, I was unable to write in typical form, and was pulled by friends towards ansemic writing. My coordination began to improve in a way that I wanted more space, and the drawings became larger. The situation I was working with was how to not merely survive but how to instigate social curiosity and presence, while being personally unable to have an image–that is while being autistic–of either self or social dynamics, that isn’t explicitly algorithmic.”

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