Camilla Wills
A tactic borrowed from a WW1 mise-en-scène at the military museum in Paris, where the curators tried to protect the visitor from the destabilization that occurs when one year merges or joins forces with another. Light is used to divide time flow and as a timeline to preserve from the rush of chaos. Ideas receive their date but the space is in camouflage, 2016 as a membrane against 2017, and further.
Press Release; dress, silk-screen ink, aerosol, office drawer; 2017. 12 x 19.25 x 15 inches.
The ‘press release’ is formatted as an invisible bride. Shopping for second-hand wedding dresses, there are more often than not yellow sweat-stains in the armpits. Readability is against expression. The white ceremonial fabric is restrictive (out of bounds) yet boundless. This is the logic of a contract: subjectivity formed by loss, invisible gains. An outfit in which status is shifted, to state change, to change in the eyes of the state.
Loss exported, tracking number W8148376; steel, fabric, wood; 2017.51 x 41 x 4 inches.
A melancholic attempt to give ‘mourning’ a form instead of marketing the unexpressed as the real thing. Irony is an operation (against the tide) that simultaneously denies and affirms its object, whose only reality is the unreality of wording. It deals in the phantom of wording … and in the process transforms the formless into discourse. Always this question: how to bring forth the world from nothing?
Contract of Indeterminate Duration; cotton bed sheet, acrylic, disco motor, metal rod, wire; 2017. Dimension variable.
The translation of contrat à durée indéterminée, considered the most desirable and firm employment contract in France.
Oblivion Seekers; straw nests, pockets; 2017. 8 x 5 x 4 inches; 8 x 6.5 x 5 inches.
Small evacuated cores, only peripheries. Driven by thoughts or asleep at the wheel.
3D Compassionate Thought (a parody); lenticular hologram; 2017. 32.5 x 20.5 inches.
Avoiding a signature form, the work of Camilla Wills appears as material improvisations that describe the conflict of the ever-present ever-absent body as it is induced and decomposed by quasi information and wording. Symbols should be taken as improper signifiers, and language as the locus of the production and storage of apparitions.
The first layer of compassion; digital archival print, silk-screen ink; 2017. 32.5 x 21 inches.
Camilla Wills is an artist and publisher living in Brussels.