Preston Wadley wants to talk to you without saying a word.
“I truly believe that visual art is a means of communication. And I use it as such,” said the Seattle artist and Cornish College of the Arts professor. “It’s a universal language.”
Wadley’s new exhibit, “Preston Wadley: Abstract Truth,” opened on Feb. 25 at Bellevue Arts Museum. It’s the museum’s first exhibit of 2023 and the most wide-ranging showing of Wadley’s signature book-form art ever. But he considers the exhibit to be a survey of his work, not a retrospective — he has plenty more to say in the coming years, after all.
There’s a simple reason Wadley chose the book as a sculptural model for his art: It’s a form that’s familiar to everyone. When you encounter a book, he explained, you know what to do: You open it and read. This ease of interaction is counter to how many people react to art in a museum, however. Wadley believes the average gallery-goer isn’t sure how to approach a work of art, how to look at it or how to experience it because, unlike sitting down and reading a text, there isn’t a codified way to “read art.”
Most museum patrons, Wadley has found, look at a work of art for 15 seconds or less. He wants those who attend his exhibition to take their time and try to “read” his art rather than passively look at it. In doing so, “You’re intellectually turning image into text,” he said. What that text might be varies from person to person, and Wadley embraces the discrepancy.
“What I’m trying to do is configure these conversations, to have the viewer get in the ballpark of what I intended,” he said. “But I love it when someone comes up with a well thought out analysis of what my art means and I say, ‘Wow, I never thought of that!’ That’s where art, for me, is.”
The book-form is tailor-made for this sort of conversation between Wadley as artist and the viewer as interpreter. All you need to do is consider the four elements that make up each piece: the book, the photograph, the sculptural element and the title.
In his earlier works, Wadley started by applying a patina of rust or verdigris to thrifted hardcover books and presented them lying open in shallow boxes that simulate frames. In his later works, the books are handmade and unconstrained, creating a decaying metallic staging ground for his imagery. Wadley then selects an anonymous historical photograph of a person or people and positions it on one page of the book. One of his sculptures features a pair of snappily dressed Black men deep in conversation, another shows a woman with a snake draped around her neck and still another depicts laborers working in a field. He juxtaposes the photograph with a found object on the opposite page, such as a set of handcuffs, an abacus, a boat, a bird or a bisected hand grenade. As for the title, he collects lists of poetic words and phrases and deploys them when they seem right for a particular piece.
The result is an iconographic text that you can “read” if you take the time to fully engage with it. The longer you consider the interplay of the image and object with the title, the more you find yourself questioning the piece’s meaning, and arguing opposing theories with both yourself and the artist in absentia. This reaction is exactly what he was going for, according to Wadley. “I enjoy creating things that demand participation,” he said.
This artistic conversation is particularly evident in his series, “Our Town,” a set of closed books positioned upright and facing each other on individual, numbered podiums. Each book is nearly identical: a nondescript gray tome with a door set in one cover and a window in the other. The books represent look-alike row houses on a single city block. However, within each door and window is a unique image.
As the viewer peeps through the window and the door of each “house,” connections between the two images gradually become apparent, as well as discrepancies between the public-facing door and the private-facing window. Then, if they wish, the viewer can match the “house number” on the podium with a list of the titles of each work. Or, they can try to guess what the title might be, based on what they witnessed in the house — Wadley leaves it up to them to decide. As to the themes found in the series, he only offers the observation, “It’s kind of a rough neighborhood, but, as we know, anything can happen in any neighborhood at any time.”
The exhibit covers a significant span of Wadley’s artistic career: 2005 to 2022. Born in 1952 in Los Angeles, Wadley has had his work featured in solo exhibitions in Seattle, Chicago, Portland and Woodstock, New York, with pieces in permanent museum collections across the country. Wadley’s art challenges not just the viewer but himself as an artist. “The Circumnavigators” (2008), for example, took him a year to conceptualize and create. But one day, Wadley suddenly stopped making art. That was the day his mother called him on the phone and asked him what his phone number was.
“The next five years were consumed with going to work and dealing with her progressive Alzheimer’s,” he said.
The artistic outcome of that dark time is “It Happens Both Ways” (2021), an ephemeral, divided triptych mounted on the museum walls. Wadley selected a passage of text and reproduced it in an enlarged format that resembles three enormous open books, then randomly blacked out sections of the text. The title comes from the opening line found at the top of the first of the three pieces, “It Happens Both Ways I.” The remaining words can be read as poetry if you can make sense of them, or confusing nonsense if you can’t, mirroring the Alzheimer’s experience.
The second work in the series, “It Happens Both Ways II,” reproduces the same redacted text, but the words are all slightly out of focus. It’s still recognizable as a printed passage of prose, but it’s not quite legible. “It Happens Both Ways III,” the final piece, is completely blurred: The image that was once words on a page now plays tricks on your eyes. The result is an optical illusion that seems to vibrate in a distressing or even infuriating way as you try to focus on it, giving you a taste of the confusion and anger often experienced by Alzheimer’s patients and mimicking the loss of reading ability as the disease progresses.
The three panels are mounted in different rooms. Wadley wants the viewer to come upon them randomly and unexpectedly, a representation of the random and unexpected way that Alzheimer’s disease strikes. They will be torn down and disposed of at the end of the show as an expression of the ephemerality of Alzheimer’s disease and of memory itself.
In addition to his book-form sculptures, a selection of photographs from Wadley’s “The Demos Project” is featured in the exhibit. This series of near-life-sized black-and-white portraits is his response to the shooting of Trayvon Martin in February 2012. In each photograph, an unsmiling individual looks directly into the camera. The subjects are of all ages, ethnicities, races and walks of life. The only thing they have in common is they are each wearing a hoodie. The scale of the prints and their placement within the gallery presents another aspect of non-verbal, non-textual conversation.
“It puts you symbolically in their space. You are metaphorically meeting them,” Wadley said.
The photographs and the book-form sculptures are designed to lead you down a road of interpretation. Your personal take on the work is what Wadley is most interested in; he believes each viewer’s life experiences inform what his art means. He encourages visitors to look at each piece and ponder what it means to them, what it means to him and what it might mean to someone else. Take your time, suggests Wadley, and listen by looking.
“Think of your eyes as ears. That’s my mantra. Art is communication. I’m trying to talk to you. I’m trying to communicate.”
Preston Wadley: Abstract Truth is on display at Bellevue Arts Museum through Oct. 8.
Read more of the Mar. 1-7, 2023 issue.