Mixed media Dimensions variable Installation view, Yale Union, Portland
Museum der Kulturen Basel, Hedi Keller Saal
Münsterplatz 20
‘Cathy Wilkes writes: “I can see and feel that my work shows loss and sadness.” One could guess at the sources of sadness that permeate her work. It’s due to the prison of subjectivity: No amount of care or empathy will bridge the enormous space between us. Or it’s due to the brutal uncertainty of our own physical presence – the trauma of being alive and apprehending the transience of all things. Or it’s due to the diversion of found objects from anonymous circulation through time and space: Within the signifying regime of art, functional objects lose their tether to the world. The affective power of Cathy’s work brings us to the edge of the known universe and into a precarious moment of dissociation that separates this world from the next. In the end, what do you have but your body and your relationships? Cathy’s work is like the essence of what’s left at your death: your mute abject body and fragmented remnants of the complex web of relations between you and everything else.’ – Hope Svenson, excerpt from Cathy Wilkes exhibition booklet, Yale Union, Portland, 2018
