SQUIER: I want to start with the Unfurl series, a poetic grouping of ink paintings on mylar that are suspended in the first gallery at Pen + Brush. They’re the first works most visitors will encounter: paintings hanging from wooden bars and thin cables, which are extremely spare, limited to black ink on a textureless white substrate. The works drift and spin delicately on the slight air currents present in the space, showing human figures — your friends and other people in your life — in two or three simultaneous poses, thus capturing a sense in motion.

You’ve also painted on both sides of the mylar, which allows the light to permeate through from the reverse side and gives the impression of a multiple exposure photograph. In fact, the paintings hover between a few fine art disciplines for me: they read as large-scale drawings because of their palette and simplicity, but they’re also a bit like black-and-white photographs, especially because of how the textures of the mylar and pooling ink give the effect of a grainy, analog image; you’ve kept your portrayals pretty close to reality, and the backgrounds are so blank that they might be blown out images lit by a bright spotlight, drawing our attention to the silhouettes of the figures. And then the large sheets of paper also have a very physical presence in the space, so that visitors have to move around them to see the portraits from different angles, as with sculpture.

I was also struck by their scale, which is larger than life, conferring a sense of your own care and dedication to the task of portraiture here. In a way, it emphasizes the public nature of the work as something meant to be seen collectively by groups of people, as opposed to some of your smaller drawings around that corner that feel more intimate and personal. The fact that the large works show nudes and the smaller ones are domestic spaces with few figures (who are more concealed and obscured from our view) makes your choices around scale all the more striking. Given the focus of the exhibit on materiality, I wonder if you could talk about your process and the particular ambitions of this series of works in speaking through your material choices.

WILKINSON: I wanted to use the properties of the materials I work with to create an installation that, to use your word, hovered between different realms. Though the sheets of mylar I painted on are large enough to give life-size figures space to breathe, the material is translucent, catching and diffusing light in such a way that it feels ethereal. I layered the figures to create a feeling of dimensionality and movement even though they are flat and stationary on a two-dimensional surface. I painted the figures using ink and water. Because mylar is not an absorbent material, the ink drifts and pools on its surface before eventually adhering, while the water evaporates. This creates an additional feeling of movement and volatility within the figures. It also invites the viewer closer, because they’re often trying to figure out the process when they encounter the works: Is this a print? A high contrast photograph?

The ambiguity and in-betweenness draw people in, which is one of my goals for this installation. I want it to feel inviting and immersive, to feel both substantial and light, to create a connection between viewer and subject that is reflective rather than voyeuristic. As people walk through the installation, the air currents created by their bodies agitate the work, breathing even more life into the painted figures. The installation becomes symbiotic, in a way—an effect I’m often hoping to create with my work.