Wild Corporation
Mimi Kato
Black Tent Transit
Patrick D. Wilson
Patrick D. Wilson, Black Tent Transit, 2020
Wood, steel, fiberglass and wool
All images, installation view, Albertine Monroe-Brown Gallery, Richmond Center for Visual Arts
The Richmond Center is pleased to premiere a major large scale sculpture by Assistant Professor Patrick D. Wilson. Using sculpture and photography, Wilson creates material distillations from the frontiers of urban expansion. His most recent work, Black Tent Transit, draws from research on westward commercial
and infrastructure development in predominantly
Tibetan regions within China's Sichuan and Qinghai
provinces.
Composed of arcing wood structures and woven wool tarpaulins draped over industrial pipe scaffold, the tent-like forms in Black Tent Transit attach themselves to a knotted and fragmented architectural matrix. Scattered intermittently throughout the space are various artifacts including a fiberglass tree trunk, a muted billboard and a dismembered cell phone tower, all detritus of the commerce that carries the urban frontier outward. In progress for nearly two years, Wilson’s Black Tent Transit will overtake the majority of the Richmond Center’s Albertine Monroe-Brown gallery in late October 2020.
This work was supported by a grant from the Faculty Research and Creative Activities Award (FRACAA), Western Michigan University (WMU).
Installation of Black Tent Transit, October 2020
About the artist
Patrick D. Wilson is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture and Integrated Media at Western Michigan University. He holds a BA from Gustavus Adolphus College and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute.
Wilson has exhibited at locations such as the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, SFMOMA Artists Gallery, the Sharjah Art Museum, Northern Arizona University Art Gallery, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, NASA Ames Research Center, and Berkeley Art Center. He has public works in the Mall of America and the University of Minnesota. In 2012, Wilson was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to photograph construction sites in China. See and read more about Patrick’s work at http://www.patrickdwilson.com/