Anne Wilson

Anne Wilson is a Chicago-based visual artist who creates sculpture, drawings, performances and video animations that explore themes of time, loss, and private and social rituals. Her artwork embraces conceptual strategies and handwork using everyday materials—table linen, bed sheets, human hair, lace, thread, glass, and wire. In this latest iteration of MAD's Craft Front & Center series dedicated to showcasing the permanent collection, Wilson's newly acquired sound and video installation, Errant Behaviors, plays in the gallery. Its source material of lace and openwork fragments are also on view in The MAD Drawing Room, a creative space for drawing, writing, and close looking. 

The MAD Drawing Room

Anne Wilson created The MAD Drawing Room for visitors to engage in the beauty and complexity of the artist's personal archives of lace and openwork textiles through close looking, drawing, or writing. The Drawing Room is inspired by the Davis Street Drawing Room, Wilson's experimental and participatory art project in Evanston, Ilinois. Within the space, visitors are invited to explore Wilson's library of art and fiber texts, listen to the playlist of sound sources for her video installation, and draw or write using the materials provided.

Errant Behaviors

Recently acquired for MAD's permanent collection, Anne Wilson's video and sound installation, Errant Behaviors, proposes surreal implications and intersections between textile, moving image, and sound. In the work, threads of lace come to life in an imaginary world through the large-scale projection of 23 frame-by-frame animations the artist constructed by hand. A soundtrack by composer Shawn Decker utilizes recorded and found sounds to create an environment of sonic activity for the threads that mirror their spirited and often humorous behavior.