Letha Wilson: Cut, Bend, Burn

Cut, Bend, Burn, a solo exhibition by Letha Wilson, opens on Saturday September 28, 2024 in CMCA’s Bruce Brown Gallery. 

The exhibit will display a selection of Wilson’s work spanning the past nine years and highlight her enduring curiosity and ingenuity within the photographic medium. Cut, Bend, Burn is a culmination of Letha’s fascination with materiality and the permeability of the photograph as a physical object. 

In this exhibition, Wilson deftly explores a photograph’s limitations of encompassing the actual site it represents by mining the formal properties of sculpture. The sweeping expanse of a desert sunset, and grooved rock formations are among images Wilson has taken while traveling in Hawaii, the American West, and Maine. Holes and industrial objects puncture, tear and perforate her photographic surfaces. A slash made with a welding torch burns and distorts an image of a mountain range. Concrete is poured directly onto an image of rock formations abstracting the view into crumpled pieces of sky and red rock. These material interventions assert the artist’s frustration with traditional landscape photography and transpose an entropic kind of beauty and meaning. It is a commentary on the tenuous balance between the land itself and the effects of human imposition.

Letha was born into a family of explorers. From an early age, she embarked upon camping trips throughout her home state of Colorado. The expansiveness of the western landscape left an indelible impression on her and ultimately, on her creative practice. In 2009 she attended a residency at Skowhegan in Maine and was enveloped by its wooded landscape. Her focus went from the expansive to the myopic, drawn to the small details she witnessed on her walks through the forest. 

In addition to works dating back to 2015, the exhibition will include a site specific installation made for the CMCA, as well as a unique, hand-altered artist book created for the occasion of the exhibition.

About the artist

Letha Wilson was born in Hawaii, raised in Colorado, and currently works in Taghkanic and Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA from Syracuse University, and her MFA from Hunter College in New York City. Letha attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2009, and her artwork has been shown at many venues including Mass MoCA, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Columbus Museum of Art, Art in General, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and International Center for Photography. Letha’s work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, the New York Times, The New Yorker, among others. Letha has been awarded artist residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Sharpe -Walentas Studio Program, among others. In both 2019 and 2014 Letha was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Photography. In Fall 2022 Letha was the Windgate Artist-in-Residence at Purchase College, State University of New York.

About the curator

Hilary Schaffner is an independent curator whose career in the arts spans over 20 years. In 2011 she co-founded Halsey McKay Gallery in Long Island, New York with the goal of bringing mid-career and emerging artists to the area. She was responsible for the direction and curation of numerous exhibitions at Halsey McKay between 2011-2017. Prior to founding the gallery, she received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City while working as Director of the Wild Project Gallery on the Lower East Side.  Hilary has worked in public relations for arts institutions including the Dia Art Foundation, Isamu Noguchi Foundation and the Cisneros Foundation. She has been a guest critic at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, NY; School of Visual Arts, NY, Parsons School of Design, NY and MECA, ME. Since moving to Maine in 2018 Hilary has curated several exhibitions including: Broken Open at Museum of New Art, Portsmouth, NH,  You Look Like a World at Able Baker Gallery, Portland, ME and Asters & Goldenrod at Alice Gavin Gallery, Portland, ME. Her curatorial work has been featured in Artforum, ArtNews, Interview, The East Hampton Star, Modern Painters, Vogue, Portland Press Herald and Boston Art Review. Hilary lives in Portland, ME.

Installation images by David Clough | Courtesy of CMCA