FLORA WILDS

I’m Flora Wilds, a multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn. I have a BA in Art History from Suffolk University and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. My education is my conceptual foundation - and has largely focused on contemporary art history, critical theory, and new genres. All of the material skills I use in my practice, such as sewing, I've taught myself. I grew up San Diego, and my work is continually informed by my youth spent in Southern California.

My practice is committed to a collaboration with found materials, including previously worn clothing, purses, quilts, and other textiles. I work with objects that have disparate and gendered histories, pop-cultural associations, that reflect capital and its pace. I am often thinking about the language surrounding commodities, learned aesthetics of gender roles, handmade labor traditions within "women's work” and textile production (fast fashion v. quilt making), gestures that complicate and queer the Minimalist sculptural cannon, archiving and deconstructing histories of desire as dictated by class, generation, and region, and material synchronicities that stretch through time.

    I am interested in the following circular system: from found object that begets a performance, performance that creates a sculpture, sculpture that produces an image, and image that re-becomes an object. As a mediator of readymade materials, I am often asking: what does an object want, both conceptually and formally, and how can I comply, refute, or complicate these perceived impulses? A used fast-fashion bikini top made of cheap spandex (weakened with wear and chlorine contact) has an inherent capacity to stretch with an intention to fit a body. In pushing this capacity to its extremes, this stretch becomes strain, holding becomes binding, security becomes entrapment, play becomes serious. When an excess of these objects breach their mundane context (flirty, leisure, feminine) and form a web across a cube of formal "men's" button-down shirts (authority, uniform, corporate)- how does our perception of both of these objects and their relationship shift? I am interested in creating sites where our associations might waver or expand or ssssstretch to a glitch.

inquiries: floraewilds@gmail.com

instagram: @abundant_commodities click here