In Letha Wilson’s sculptures, photographic images (many taken during her forays into the American wilderness) act as transformative skins. As much façade as form, her assemblages involving concrete and metal are physically activated by the scenic views applied to them and conceptually charged by the associations and myths of those distant landscapes. By taking apart the tropes of landscape photography, Wilson sheds light on the modern search for “natural,” unspoiled vistas and experiences, as well as the image’s ability to illuminate our longed-for desires. By breaking the rules of photography, tearing and tampering with the flat image, she restores dimensionality and wildness to her subject, reveling in processes that destroy the preciousness of the picture and “the picturesque.”
Rajesh Punj: What first intrigued me about your work was the relationship between the two- and three-dimensional. Essentially, you make the photograph physical. Do we call these works “sculptures”?
Letha Wilson: I’m happy to call them that. I feel like my practice is much closer to sculpture than photography, though I do take my photographs. I don’t really know what it means to have a media-specific practice. Early on, I felt at home with painters and sculptors. When I would go into the dark room, I sometimes thought, “Oh my god, they’re going to hate me because I’m not doing the right thing.” I’ve felt very nervous about processing my pictures because photography has its rules, and I was breaking them. You can see how those divides cut across art history and how we talk about it—the separation between sculpture and photography, painting and printmaking—it’s ingrained. I want to mix that all up.
RP: How has your work been received?
LW: I worked like this for many years, breaking landscape photography apart and working with it sculpturally. It was only in 2010 or 2011 that I started to have an audience. People were asking what this work was, and suddenly I was in all these shows. My first show in New York was with a photo gallery because, to them, I was principally a photographer. In a way, I think the photography world responded to my work because they understood what I was doing, but I see myself much more as a sculptor. I enjoy the process of making so much.
RP: Can you introduce the works that you showed in “Fields of Vision,” your recent exhibition at GRIMM Gallery in London?
LW: They were all new works that I made for the show. Having visited the space, I wanted to make a series of smaller scale sculptures that slotted together. They came as individual parts that were then assembled on site. I originally tried this at Frieze last year, and I wanted to continue working in the same vein. I start by making much smaller maquettes. I had lots of models in my studio, and I realized that you couldn’t see the backs or sides. For the show, I introduced two long plinths, with the sculptures placed at intervals so that you could easily walk around them. Seeing a conversation between the pieces has prompted me to think more about the front and back of the work. In the round, you have a different experience with each of them, which I appreciate. This is something that interests me about working in sculpture—it gives and goes somewhere. I think of all the ways that I see the landscape, photographing it in space, and to have that be part of the work and have it become three-dimensional is exciting.
RP: I am interested in your understanding of the physicality of the photograph. When you talk about your work, I think about the image and how we experience it as a physical form.
LW: I was a painting major as an undergrad, but I was also interested in the kinds of works that were crossing mediums and materials. I was taking sculpture, photography, and printmaking classes, and when I moved to New York and went to graduate school, I was drawn more and more to sculpture, which is what I respond to the most. I am excited by its limitless possibilities—how it can look like something as much as it looks like nothing. I feel like sculpture doesn’t break any rules, because there are fewer. At the same time, I was creating photographed sculptures and installations, using landscape photographs from my childhood in Colorado. It’s been 20 years ago now since I decided I was interested in focusing on works that have an image of nature, addressing ideas about how landscape photography can be contemporary, and not what we think it is.
At that time, photography and sculpture had separate review listings in art publications, which I thought was strange because, to me, they were the same: tools coming from the same place, or another material for making. It seems to be a question of how a photograph should behave; photography is very conservative in terms of presentation, as opposed to sculpture. There are so many rules around picture-making, which I have gone through, dissected, blown up, welded, and burned. I was drawn to the beauty of the landscape through photography, but I also felt like things didn’t end with the image. For me, that’s where it all begins.
RP: So, how do you go about taking the image as a starting point?
LW: A lot of my early work goes back to the dark room and printing in color. I was interested in a specific paper that’s plastic on one side and strong, to which I added poured concrete. I wanted to get very physical with the material and continue to do so. For almost 10 years, I have worked with metal, specifically steel, but I’ve also added copper, brass, and zinc, and the qualities of those materials combine. I’ve also introduced a UV printing process, which is relatively new. The material goes onto a flatbed machine, and the ink is sprayed onto it and cured. I can put anything up to two inches on these machines, though I’m not personally printing them; I have a professional do it. This has led me to create outdoor sculptures—like Pacific Coast View Holes Steel, which I recently completed for the ICA San Diego/North sculpture garden—with images printed directly on the surface of the steel.
RP: Your work seems to want to draw together nature and the urban environment, two very different physical contexts that offer very different experiences. Nature is seen as the other from within an urban environment, and yet the city needs the natural world. Then there are the very heavy, industrial materials that come in contact with the photographs. How do you see the relationship between these environments and materials?
LW: When I’m taking the photographs, I’m going out on research trips. I experience these places firsthand, and that is transmitted through the images. But I also take back to the studio what I’ve observed in terms of light, shadow, and gravity to create physical forms that have a literal or poetic connection. I am interested in how seeing an image of a place can transport you to that place, making you want to return to the moment. Everyone has some sort of relationship with nature. The landscape can be seen as a place of commonality or intersection between people. It is interesting how memories are triggered by what we see. I’ve overheard people looking at Joshua Tree and saying, “It smells amazing.” The work, the image, is affecting their bodies—there’s a connection between the experience, memory, and the body. I want the viewer to bring all of that to the work.
Photo: Philipp Scholz Rittermann
RP: When we are in nature, we often yearn to return to the city, and vice versa. There is an intriguing duality to the modern experience that’s made visual and physical in your work.
LW: I think about the experience of being in a place, a very remote place in Utah where you have no markers of civilization, and how it immediately feels like it may be thousands of years ago. There’s a timelessness that happens there; yet, at that same moment, hundreds of thousands of people are getting on their subway commute into the city. The two things seem vastly separate, not just through time, but through space.
RP: There is a kind of mythmaking through absence that applies to the landscape and the environment. We are aware of remote places, but when we are within the normal zone of our lives, they can almost become fictional. Is it that they only exist when we see them?
LW: “Fields of Vision” was named after an article that I came across a few years ago by the art historian Shelley Rice, who wrote it for a 1984 exhibition at Bard College. Earth artists were invited to propose projects for the campus, none of which ever happened. Rice’s essay was the first time I had heard someone discuss how 19th-century landscape photographers paved the way for “the picturesque,” successfully transmitting images of places to people who would otherwise never have seen them. This led to the creation of national parks, like Yellowstone. Before, most people didn’t know about and hadn’t thought to go to these places, but the pictures invited everyone, in turn destroying the land. Current generations are having to deal with the repercussions of this history, for better or for worse.
Rice also talks about earth artists situating works in the environment or using land as material. Having been to some of those iconic places, like Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels, I felt like, “This is just an excuse to get me out here.” It’s about the experience, and seeing images of the piece is something else, right? I’m interested in that, and what that means. I have since started working with sculpture outdoors, thinking about how we embrace entropy and the will of the environment to destroy things. There’s the idea that art should fight against nature and last forever, especially outdoor sculpture. I see that as audacious. I am incredibly interested in works that surrender to nature. What does it mean to purposefully surrender or let things go? What does it mean to control that?
RP: Your works seem to domesticate, or contain, elements from nature. How do you manage that? Is it that the photographs become less and less of what they represent, and more an aesthetic skin?
LW: I am interested in those differences, and again, that’s something to do with photography. Our relationship to the image can be vastly different, depending on its size. The other thing I was thinking about in terms of material is that if the back of a sculpture is made of steel, that surface is valued as much as the image, so there isn’t a hierarchy in terms of image and material—they are individual elements coming together. This interests me greatly, especially with this series. In some of the works, there is as much raw metal as there is image, and you are viewing both mediums at once.
This was the first time I showed the wall pieces in which I welded directly onto the picture. The print inevitably gets burned and corrupted, which is the uncontrollable part. I’m learning how to tread the line, and it comes back to balance—the image and the sculpture are bound. With the wall pieces, I’m bending the metal and pushing it back as far as it can go before it breaks. I’m also finding the tension point between the material and the image. It’s a combination of treating it well, but at the same time, really wanting to push it to the breaking point.
RP: Are you always experimenting?
LW: Every time I do a project or show, I’m looking for ways to try something new. I want to do something I haven’t done before and learn from it. I’m a person who learns through process, especially “working battles.” I worked for many years with concrete and made dozens and dozens of works, and through that process got to understand the material. Working with metal is more challenging because you need to have a plan, especially if it’s a sculpture that has to stand—then you have to consider things from an engineering point of view. Fundamentally, it requires a balance between planning and control and letting something unexpected happen. It takes time to learn how a material behaves.
RP: So, is there more precision to what you’re doing and less chance?
LW: It can go back and forth. When I am working with the maquettes, I always introduce small prints from my printer and play with them, which gives me many ideas going forward. Then, it’s a question of whether I do it on a larger scale or do it better.
RP: America and scale have always had a fascinating marriage. Is scale about space? Isn’t there also an element of time?
LW: For me, it’s very much particular to a project or site. I’m often responding to an interior or exterior space, and that is something that I love about working with photography. In terms of temporal work, I’ve done many works that are built for a specific wall or window space. For example, I cut holes into gallery walls and look for windows where the light initially covers and then comes through the image, which draws attention to viewer expectations about how a material or medium should behave. What does it mean to defy those expectations, and how does it work? It can be that drywall is used on the outside, or that a wall isn’t flat. I remember the first time I drilled a hole through a photograph: it felt quite thrilling because I was breaking a rule—you are not supposed to drill a hole through the image. The preciousness of the photograph, its flatness, is sacred. What happens when you start to pick that apart?
RP: In Steel I-Beam Wall Push (2018), composed of a digital print and steel beam pressed into one another, the image creases inwards. I see it in my mind as almost billboard-size.
LW: It is eight feet by 10 feet exactly. When the work was installed in New York, I cut a hole into the wall, and the idea was to push the beam into the gallery using a huge crane. Not knowing what would happen was exciting, and it felt like a performative work because I had been given one chance to make it work. A lot of the works have a risk factor; there’s a question of whether they’re going to work or not. I am trying to push that, and that’s scary. Pushing through the fear interests me—breaking or trying to destroy the image, asking what that means, and understanding what the limits should be—as does letting go of my expectations.
RP: Is there an element of autobiography in the work?
LW: I think there’s something of a presence, strangely enough. We did a lot of hiking trips as a family, and my dad would always take on the role of leader. He was very concerned about our safety and wanted us to respect the land. I understood from an early age that it can be dangerous out there. So, when I go out by myself, I’m always a little nervous because I know that I’m already breaking a rule—you are not supposed to go by yourself. I think part of that is pushing the limits of our comfort, of being safe but still going into the unknown, the unsafe place, knowing and doing it anyway, and not letting it stop me from taking a trip. Somehow there’s a correlation there, between the work and the risk of going out in nature by yourself or taking these trips alone for days at a time.
RP: I’m interested in the edges of your sculptures, because they can have very particular and quite prominent lines that define the shapes. How do you decide on the physical appearance of a work?
LW: If I think of the wall pieces, the frame becomes the starting point, and it either keeps it together or pulls it apart, pushing against or breaking out, as a foil; the frame is the outline of a container to work against. Similarly, a gallery can feel like a container you’re working against, or a landscape rectangle, which is so pervasive, especially in photographs. How do you break out of that, and how hard it is to free yourself of the frontal plane? I can employ these containers/frames to experiment within limits. I see each of the works as being made up of a balance between the chaotic beauty of nature and the limits of material matter; it goes back and forth. Importantly, there is no hierarchy of sculpture over photography; it is a complicated relationship. For a long time, I’ve been interested in the space between, the unexplainable, and the reason behind the golden ratio, which doesn’t make sense but is still utterly amazing.
RP: In a strange contradiction, it seems that the more you produce, the less you want to know, which motivates you to want to know more. Are you interested in the idea of not knowing?
LW: I know how to take a picture, but I don’t always know about the technical aspects. All too often photographers become incredibly technical, which I don’t want to do. I appreciate having a “beginner’s brain” approach to what I do—that’s where it becomes magical. The dark room is a remarkable place, and it is incredible when an image comes out of the processor as a negative that the light shines through. Part of it is embracing what it is, without worrying too much about how it’s created because I work with many materials, and there are many potential ways that it can become something interesting. I see everything as being very gradual, in terms of the different processes, including pouring concrete, woodworking, mold-making, welding, and metalwork. Mine is not a focused journey. Even though it all comes together, and I understand it is part of a universe of work, it’s still not linear.
Letha Wilson’s California View Holes Steel (La Orilla Trail) is on permanent view at the ICA San Diego/North’s sculpture garden. “Cut, Bend, Burn,” her solo show at CMCA in Rockland, Maine, is on view through January 12, 2025.
