Wilson Whitlock: The Line Goes Up
This review originally appeared in the July 25th and 26th edition of the Courier in Russellville, AR
The Norman Hall Art Gallery is a quiet place in the summer. When I visited this past week, there were only a handful of youth in the building, and I was alone in the gallery. I think that the Arkansas Governor’s School is still going on, but I was in early to see Wilson Whitlock’s solo exhibition, “The Line Goes Up.”
Whitlock’s show must feel triumphant for him. He was an undergraduate student at Arkansas Tech and his work is the featured exhibition for the summer. Quite a return to make only a few years after his 2021 graduation. The show features work created for his master’s thesis in painting from the University of Memphis, where he graduated earlier this year. All the works displayed are acrylic paintings on canvas. The gallery is awash in the vibrant colors that acrylic paints allow. Whitlock favors bright hues that look nearly neon or perhaps radioactive, only occasionally muted or contrasted with darker purples or blues.
Wilson’s works plays with opposition and intentionally distorted perspectives. The vibrant colors are only momentarily distracting from the menace at the heart of these works. Consider the 2025 painting “All Tied Up”, which has a couple with cartoonish smiling faces and round apple cheeks in the kitchen, the man holding a basket from which ties spill out, dripping from the basket but also the cabinets and clinching around the man’s throat. The cheery yellow lends itself to the atmosphere of menace, hiding the same way the couple hides behind their smiles and the wife hides whatever is in her hand. The painting emphasizes the couple by collapsing the space around them, the planes and distances of the background and fridge not quite realistic.
The skewing of perspective becomes even more pronounced in other pieces in the show. In “Night in the Neighborhood” an apartment courtyard becomes a scene of unreality, the perspective forced into something like a fisheye camera lens. The buildings and lines go wobbly at the edges and then disappear entirely into darkness that edges the canvas. This focus flattens the depth of the angle, the ground nearly as close as the tops of the buildings, the cracks of the sidewalk and knocked over lawn chairs becoming something ominous in the painting’s singular light source.
The banal’s slow bleed into the horrifying is explicit in “Joe in a Cup”, where a coffee shop has transformed into a nightmare both dark and fluorescent. This painting plays with the vibrant color palette Whitlock’s other paintings use, but the dark purples and blues manage to make the bright colors brighter, the contrast an effective medium for the message. In this coffee shop, the round red human-ish figures seem to smile, even as they bleed and melt, one of them has a bird of prey ready to sink talons into its back. On the floor, a blood like spill from an overturned coffee cup grasps at human form, reaching upwards and lined in a seafoam green. Amid the donuts on display there’s a mask and a bug as big as a cat.
The title piece for the show, a stately and impressive six-foot by eight-foot canvas on the back wall of the gallery, is where the many motifs at play come together. The large panel has three parts that bleed into each other chaotically, the perspective like taking a panoramic photo too close, the center bugling towards you while the sides fall away in a linear arc. On the left side of the painting there’s an exclamation mark and question mark floating in the sky with a giant eye, above a mountain that seems to be steaming, though its steam mixes and disperses with the smoke from the factory towers billowing beside it. A giant fire hydrant spills green sludge, making up or messing up the river that surrounds the middle third of the painting. This middle part is a city which reads like a futuristic shanty town. The multi-colored metal squares and triangles that make up the buildings are stacked on top of each other, without room for life or people within or outside of them. There’s a stacked glass pyramid without a pointy top and here the sky swirls like an approaching storm. In the painting’s right-hand side, the mountains and pyramids become a red arrowing, shooting up. The apple-cheeked cartoon man looms with shining eyes like Godzilla over the organic reds of tree leaves and flowers. A dog (or perhaps a fat cat?) looks worried beneath him as the edge bleeds into the soft shapes of a park, a lake, and a bench.
Whitlock’s statement for the show says that his work addresses anxiety, what he describes as the “contemporary condition” of his generation. The scenes his paintings reference are part of his real experiences, taken from his life and distorted through the lens of fear and anxiety, creating menace out of coffee shops, grocery stores, and apartment courtyards. He works in these lurid colors, emphasized best against their contrasting darknesses, to make a world that looks like candy and brightness, but feels beneath it like something bad is about to happen, is already happening. What is promised in the distance—bright colors and psychedelic perspectives, a promise that something might be fun—becomes unsettled (and unsettling) upon closer examination, when you get closer to it. Whitlock sees this as the condition of his particular time and place, but it feels to me like an apt metaphor for coming to adulthood too. That growing up seems like a good time, right until you get there and nothing’s quite as clear as it seemed. But you keep growing up anyways.
“The Line Goes Up” will be on display in the Norman Hall Art Gallery until August 12. The gallery is open to the public Monday through Friday from 8am to 5pm. Wilson Whitlock can be found on Facebook and Instagram.
