Via Our Lives Magazine:

Wilson is a 26 year old multimedia artist based in Madison, originally from Benton, Arkansas. His work centers on the use (and misuse) of art materials to highlight the low-quality garbage that defines modern consumer culture. Wilson advocates for consumption habits that support skilled craftspeople, and rejects the mass-production of digestible corporate home decor.

From a distance, much of Wilson’s work could be mistaken for stains, spills, or actual garbage. In 2023, a TikTok in which he showed a series of pressure-washed paintings on cotton paper went viral for all the wrong reasons. Over five-thousand comments, primarily negative, hated the concept that time could be spent attempting to replicate the texture and color of trash. This reaction encouraged him to unpack why viewers seemed insulted by the concept and to push those same processes further.

“People buy actual garbage every day, products that are designed to go straight to the landfill, but when I attempt to recreate the patina of their wasteful purchases, it seems to trigger something within them. I’ve never gotten such an intense online response, positive or negative, which tells me I’ve found something I’ve got to dig deeper into. I’m not immune to the sins of consumer culture, but I know there’s a better way and I desperately want people to think about that.”

Wilson combines traditional art materials such as oil, acrylic, and graphite with nontraditional application techniques. 

“I love objects that show their age. Decaying road signs, sad abandoned buildings, a 30-year-old Coke can on the side of the road. I can’t get enough of those textures, so I try and replicate them in my art. A pressure-washer is great for blasting paint off of the canvas, and allows me to add and remove dozens of layers of material to craft a painting that looks like it got left in your backyard for a few years.”

Wilson also searches eBay and salvage yards for antique hardware that he can combine into intricate, tactile sculptures. 200 door stops, or 50 dresser knobs, when attached to the same object, become almost unrecognizable.

Across both his 2D and 3D work, Wilson’s pieces reject the ideals of the modern consumer habits in favor of compositions and textures that are impossible to recreate or mass produce. Instead of selling prints, which he feels, in a quest for affordability, sacrifices essential textures and shadows, he makes his sketches and small works available at accessible price-points.

After moving from Arkansas four years ago, Wilson has settled in Madison with his husband, Logan, and their two cats. Since then, his work has been featured in coffee shops and retail spaces around the city. This spring, Wilson completed a 3-month artist residency in Beaumont-des-Pertuis, France. Working in such a remote and ancient village provided a unique opportunity to focus exclusively on his art and to draw inspiration from the textures around him.  Works from this residency were exhibited at The Bounty in Madison, where he will be undertaking his next residency in 2025.