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Virgil Marti: For Oscar Wilde
"For Oscar Wilde" was made to commemorate the centennial of Wilde's trial and imprisonment. The installation was designed as a series of tableaus with increasing degrees of abstraction, in accord with Wilde's ideas about the superiority of the artificial over the natural. Wilde spoke of the sunflower and lily as being the natural forms best suited to design; so the viewer moved from a patch of live sunflowers growing outside, to a field of silk lilies in the cellblock, to a cell wallpapered with those motifs. Ironically, the design of Eastern State Penitentiary somewhat resembles a flower.
I have no first-hand experience of prison, so I felt it would have been offensive to conjecture what that would be like. However, I did always find Eastern State very beautiful. What does it mean to have an intense aesthetic experience in such an awful place? This seems related to the terrible irony of Wilde's life - preaching aestheticism as beyond conventional morality and ending up in prison.
Rather than rely solely on the poetics of decay in the penitentiary, I chose to insert something new and pristine in jarring contrast with the surroundings.
Wilde wrote, in letters from prison, that he found the white walls to be one of the most dehumanizing aspects. In an attempt to redress this complaint, I refurbished a cell for him and wallpapered it. Wilde's association with wallpaper is best-known through his alleged deathbed quote: "My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go." While researching, I came across another: "Modern wallpaper is so bad, that a boy brought up under its influence could allege it as a justification for turning to a life of crime."
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"For Oscar Wilde.", 1995.
Live sunflowers, ceramic plaque, silk lilies, handprinted wallpapers (pigment on paper-backed cotton sateen), cotton velveteen, iron bed.
Documentation of an installation at Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia.
Overall dimensions: variable.
Cell dimensions: 106" H x 96" W x 216" D
(click on each image for a larger version) |
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VIRGIL MARTI
EDUCATION |
1990 |
Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Summer |
1990 |
Tyler School of Art, Temple University, M.F.A. Painting |
1984 |
School of Fine Arts, Washington University, B.F.A. Painting |
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GRANTS AND AWARDS |
2005 |
Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship |
2003 |
Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship |
1997 |
Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award |
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Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship |
1995 |
Pew Fellowship |
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SOLO EXHIBITIONS |
2004 |
Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York |
2003 |
Project Room, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA |
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The Flowers of Romance, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA |
2002 |
Grow Room, Participant Inc., New York |
2001 |
Morris Gallery, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia |
2000 |
Beer Can Library, Habitat, London, England |
1999 |
Holly Solomon Gallery, New York |
1998 |
Hot Tub, Thread Waxing Space, New York |
1996 |
White Room, White Columns, New York |
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SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS |
2004 |
Whitney Biennial 2004, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York |
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Flowers Observed, Flowers Transformed, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA |
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What's New?, Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, Netherlands |
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Social Studies, Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Champaign, IL |
2003 |
NYPD, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica, CA |
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On the Wall: Wallpaper and Tableaux, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia |
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On the Wall, Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, Providence, RI |
2002 |
Imprint, The Print Center and various sites, Philadelphia |
| MATERIAL WORLD From Lichtenstein to Viola 25 Years of the Fabric Workshop
and
Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia |
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Officina America, Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Bologna, Italy |
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View Finder, Arnolfini, Bristol, England |
2001 |
Miss World 1972, Daniel Reich, New York |
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Stand Fast Dick and Jane, The Project, Dublin, Ireland |
2000 |
Gardens of Pleasure, John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI |
1999 |
Natural Dependency, Jerwood Gallery, London, England |
1997 |
Apocalyptic Wallpaper, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH |
1996 |
You talkin' to me?, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia |
1995 |
Prison Sentences: The Prison as Site/The Prison as Subject, Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia |
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SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS |
| Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design |
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Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College |
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New Museum |
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Philadelphia Museum of Art |
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Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art |
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Victoria and Albert Museum |
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